Cities: Skylines

Luke and Alex talk Cities: Skylines.

Cities: Skylines is a city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is a single-player open-ended city-building simulation. Players engage in urban planning by controlling zoning, road placement, taxation, public services, and public transportation of an area. They also work to manage various elements of the city, including its budget, health, employment, and pollution levels. It is also possible to maintain a city in a sandbox mode, which provides more creative freedom for the player.

Cities: Skylines was first released for the Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems in March 2015, with ports to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 game consoles being released in 2017, for the Nintendo Switch in September 2018, and for Google Stadia in May 2022 developed by Tantalus Media. The game received favorable reviews from critics, and was a commercial success, with more than twelve million copies sold on all platforms as of June 2022.

Both Luke and Alex played Cities: Skylines on their Windows PCs.

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Transcript

Luke 0:21

Hello and welcome to LoFive Gaming. I am Luke, and this is my co-host, Alex.

Alex 0:27

Hey, what up, everybody? Welcome back. Hello, hello. Um, welcome for the first time. I don't know where you're at with your listenership. You know, there is that. And then we're also, you know, bringing on a bit of a new community as we introduce the LoFive Education Project. Yes. Do the applause thing. Low Five Education Project. There we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, a quick explainer on that. Uh, I, Luke, I'm in grad school, finishing up at Hamlin Environmental Education. This is a video game podcast. Why are we talking about environmental education? Well, hold on. We'll get there. Yes. And actually, in addition to this podcast, we will have three companion pods that you will uh have access to two on our pod feed as well as bonus episodes. Yeah. So if you go to the LoFive website, the LoFive Education Project is essentially my uh video game advocacy project. In my time as an educator, as a video game player, and as a student myself, I kind of blended a lot of my ideas here, a lot of my passions, and the idea is that video games, when used properly, are essentially an educational tool, and they are a very powerful educational tool that hold just a ton of potential for pot for positivity, uh, student engagement, and like real learning concepts. And unfortunately, they are vastly underutilized when viewed in that context. So Luke's been trying to get me to play Skylines for the pod forever. Yeah, we'll get into that. But now he's strong on me.

Luke 1:52

It's my project, bro. This is our original that almost brought almost broke up the podcast before it even got going, but we'll get into those tragedies later. Uh the whole idea of the project is uh advocating for using video games as instructional tools within schools. Two things here. One, I as a teacher, professional, would love to see them implemented within the schools, and there's a ton of validity as to why we should do that. They hold a ton of potential. And considering that you may be listening from all the way from Sydney, Australia, to Canada, to America, Austin, South Korea, South Korea. Um, you might have kids, you might have nieces, you might have nephews, you just might have, you know, general interests in your life. So we're also just advocating for the idea that there are educational principles and learning that takes place in playing games, and we just really want to highlight that. There's an entire section on the website dedicated to the project. I've written about roughly five, six articles. We hope to add to that in the future, but a brief overview of what those hold. There's an introductory video essay, we'll have that up. We'll also have just like the script if you just want to read it. Um, an article on semiotic domains sounds really fancy. Stay tuned for that. Also, two uh articles on identity and identity within gaming. Then there's epistemic gaming, which is all about using job skills and like real life parameters of a job within gaming, and then just some general guides as to how you should use video games in school and things you need to keep in mind based off of much of the research I did for my grad school project.

Alex 3:18

Right on. And I would just say that, you know. So we're taking a slightly different angle to this particular podcast. I mean, it's going to be very similar to our others, but it does have uh a little bit more focused and education forward focus. If that is some and if that's something you really enjoyed, I really, really do recommend checking out those bonus apps that we drop because uh there's some great conversation there. And please do not hesitate to reach out and keep that conversation going either on our Discord, which you can find a link in our show notes, or by sending us an email at hello at lowfivegaming.com because we'd love to hear from you, love to hear your thoughts and uh continue this conversation.

Luke 3:52

And as the website grows, Alex mentioned this will have a little bit more of an educational uh spin to it, but we're definitely um still here for some entertainment as well. Future podcasts are going to be based on different games that are either community suggested or things that are hot in the environment or things that we've always been meaning to play. But we do are and have been looking to expand the site and do some different things. So with this project afterwards, I have every intention of kind of reviewing and going through games and their validity as an educational experience. Totally, dude.

Alex 4:25

Yeah, I would just say that you know we've we've teased additional content for a while now and it's come out in certain ways, and we have more ideas floating about how to expand and grow low five gaming as a whole. I am super excited to have uh you know your your grad project and the education angle incorporated into the low five gaming. I think it's super cool, and I'm really excited to to have that live on the website. There's potential to review the games through an educational lens, it's still very much based on like, is this a good game? Is this fun? Because as I've learned from my research, games that are fun and engaging are the ones that kids, I mean, pretty obviously actually play and enjoy and learn through. If you can think of your own experience, if you didn't enjoy the game, you probably stopped playing. Right. So it's not gonna be like a super dry review. I'm still gonna be my goofy self, but I'm gonna like really narrow in on like what type of things you could teach through this game, what types of things you could be looking for, and uh how good of a job it does. And then you kind of have some ideas if you want to share about what you might be seeing from Alex on the horizon here. I've been playing around with a low five compendium podcast, which would be on a weekly. Now I'm still figuring out the exact format of that, but I think essentially it's uh it's what it sounds like. It is a compendium to our mainline pod. So you get a little bit more of me in your life. Yeah, you've been don't don't hide the secret. You've been practicing little video blogs. I can't give all the information away. We're working on different things, give you a little more a little more low-five content and expand uh expand what this project is as a whole. Invite, you know, engaged listeners to join us in some in talks that are outside of the mainline episode for the month. Uh is one thing we have. Get ready for Alex's 100 top 10 games of all time. No. Ever ongoing joke there about his inability to really nail down his ever expanding. This is the top 10 game. It's a 10. It's a masterpiece. There are so many excellent games out there, bro. There is. So, you know, the most excellent game of weekends. Red Dead Redemption 2 has cracked the top 10. Yeah, it actually has. So he, as much as we joke, he he is officially moving that one into his somewhat scripted top 10. For the avid listener, you'll be happy to know that I have completed that game. I rolled the credits. Rolled the credits. He did it. He is a cowboy master. And that uh that game actually comes up a lot in the education project because even though it's a goofy cowboy simulator, there's actually some really good things in that game. And that's another tease for additional content. We're going to do a spoiler, a spoiler pod uh where we uh talk about the story of Red Dead. So don't listen to that one unless you played the game, or just don't care to ever play and you want to hear our takes. Sure. Alright, so moving on to our official game of the hour, City's Skylines. What is it? Why did we choose it for this pod? Why did I choose it for this project? Infamously in our history as a podcast going over a little over a year now. Alex, in a very scandalous move, we we really honor each other's choices each month, and we play the game whether we truly actually want to play the game that the brother has selected. We both play it together and we fruitfully do it. And Alex, very scandalous, just skipped City Skylines last year and just gave me a my bad dog. Dude, my computer broke and me, me, me, me, me, me, me. And he could have found time. But anyway. Oh man. So it's been an ongoing joke every time that I'm gonna pick City's Skylines as one of my favorite games to play ever. So I've always said that, you know, as a joke that I was gonna do it to him and make him play it again. But more seriously, it's been a particularly influential game for me, um, both playing it for joy and also like I got this game right after I got my grad school laptop. And it's a game that I've been playing alongside my studies, and it is the best example. You'll hear it a ton in my different articles and the compendium podcasts to the articles, but you'll hear it as a game that like really has sparked a lot of imagination and potential and abilities with like teaching all of the things I'd be learning. It would just bleed into this game, and I could view it through that lens, and then I'd go to work as a teacher, and then I'd be like, man, what we're doing as teachers can kind of be boring sometimes. I kind of wish I could do something fun like this, and I could be having these types of conversations. So that's kind of how it got to this point. And also there are three themes that I'll get into later for this project, but they are social studies, content, what I teach, environmentalism, environmental education, and like career, skills, and identity lens. And this game perfectly fits all three of those in quite a spectacular way. Right? A breakdown of the City Skylines itself. Here you get it. City Skylines is a 2015 city building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is a single player open-ended city building simulation. Players engage in urban planning by controlling zoning and road placement, taxation, public services, and public transportation of an area. They also work to manage various elements of the city, including its budget, health, employment, and pollution levels. It is also possible to maintain a city in a sandbox mode, which provides more creative freedom for the player. So this game came out uh for Windows in the March of 2015 and has been since released to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Google Stadia. If you are familiar with the kind of classic, it's a modern polished take on SimCity, which is very famous. And a lot of academic work that I studied was actually based on that game. This game is more polished, in my personal opinion, and a lot of like gamers' opinions. Like they tried to do a new SimCity and it it it was really messy and didn't work well. Yeah, they tried well, there's reasons for that. It was because they went fully online and people didn't like it. That's a scandalous thing for another day. But so this is like the buzzword buzzword in the video game industry. It is a buzzword. Um, no, the buzzword being spiritual successor to SimCity. Yeah, and don't get an educator going on buzzwords because we'll be talking about buzzwords all day. A lot of work has been done on this style of game. So what do you actually do? Basically, you manage traffic at all times. Uh, it is a traffic simulator. That is a joke, but also if you've played the game enough, you're like, yes. When I'm on Reddit or in different forums or communities for this game, which has definitely happened, a lot of people love to share their screenshots, and within their screenshots of their city, they always include um their traffic flow, what percentage it's at, and I I kind of get a kick out of that. But you build a city, you build your city with industry, design, you can create campuses and parks like national parks, zoos, city parks, like a central city park and like an amusement park. You have complete college campuses, you're placing things, those are within the expansions generally, but you manage and maintain and grow and kind of just like do whatever you want with a city. It is a sandbox, meaning that you play within this. There's no story within this game. You're building and you're creating and you're doing right. And it's as simple as that. It's also managing, it's also just being creative. It ranges all the way from like placing streets, putting entire infrastructures of railroad systems, airports, police, firefighters, putting in schools. You need to build an elementary school, or you're designing a complete college campus. Right. The parks in your cities, are you just placing a dog park? Are you building like an intricate nature preserve or national park within the different expansions of the games, or even just within the base game? There's just so much possibility. It is like it is a wonderful sandbox. The idea is that you like grow and have fun and like take out whatever design you want, and it has like a really cool player community that's super involved. You go onto Reddit or a lot of different forums online, and it's it's a very vibrant and I'd say overwhelmingly positive community. I've the amount of times I've looked up problems. Yeah, you know, is that there's not any of that, is there? No, actually there is the internet. I'm sure there is because it is the internet, but I've always seen people freak out and they're like, How do I fix this? And people like give the most detailed, wonderful responses. It's pretty cool. Uh I definitely find myself in a couple of those forums, especially after you were telling me about death waves and traffic management. Yeah. Uh specifically the death waves, and uh I got some good intel on there. Yeah, I mean, and to confuse that's essentially just like your people, your sims, they're dying. You grow way too fast. So you're managing these cities and you like you plot like zones, so it's like a residential zone, and then houses kind of spring up organically on their own, depending. And then your city has different needs, so you need to educate your citizens, you need to have a firefighter, you need to have a policeman, you need to give them jobs, so you need industrial zones, you need commercial zones. And it just kind of the game does a nice job of like layering these things to kind of like make you ready for it. You also have a budget to maintain, you got taxes to set, you have different policies, so it gets pretty nitty-gritty. Unless you turn it off, the game doesn't actually allow you to do it, like unlock certain things as your city grows. Yeah, and I'm always conflicted because like even though I know everything for the most part, it's still like I'm not ready to worry about like bus stops yet. I just need to worry about my yeah, my base infrastructure. So, like that said, the next city I build, I'm gonna go without just because I want to sell it full force, but yeah. I mean, and I feel that too because like I get really deep and then I'm like, uh I don't want to like tear up a bunch of streets, but I want to have like a monorail or a train station rip through town, and I don't have the space for that. So, what exactly is so fun about this game? I and my wife um kind of well, she in referring to me, I call it time traveling. And uh through having you play this pod, and you had played it a little bit previously, but in this playthrough, you got a little bit more hooked, and we'll kind of get into that later as far as some barriers. But I call it time traveling because you get so obsessed with building and maintaining and grooming your city, so to speak. It's like it's like you got a little miniature ship in a bottle thing going. You look up on your clock and it's been like two, three hours, and you're like, Oh, I need to cook dinner, or like people need me in my life. I can't just be doing this. It happened to me a couple nights ago. I was like, All right, I'm gonna play an hour of City Skylines, and then I'm gonna go to bed. Three and a half hours later, I was like, Oh man, I need to go to bed. But my city was popping. Yeah, and you really, yeah, you're meeting those goals, and it's like this fun, this hook is the way I would put like what hooks you in and really makes it. It's it's really important because once again, it's wild, man. There's not yeah, I mean, you're you're you're seeing the growth happen live, right? So I mean I think that's a big part of it. You're watching your city kind of just blow up, not blow up like you're watching it grow, you're watching your city grow in live action, and every decision you make is gonna have an impact on the flow of your city, it's gonna have an impact on your citizens, the how everything looks, how everything works. So it's I it's a weird thing, man. It's it I haven't played a lot of games like this where you know you don't if you feel like you're doing nothing, but you also feel like you're doing everything at once. It's crazy. Yeah, and you can get so worked up in these tiny details. That fun and that hook, it's really dude, it's crazy. Like that hook, and when it gets you is really important for this educational perspective because it makes mundane, boring subjects like traffic management, city infrastructure, and like what really matters to a city incredibly fun. I definitely respect intersections more than I ever have in my life. Or when you go on a road trip now, like you're you're looking at the layout of roads and how you're getting in and off of highways, and you're like, man, this game right. Yeah, that's it. Honestly, though, I'm like, what an exchange. Or like uh going over is that the Wabashaw Bridge off 52 uh right of it. But all all the listeners from St. Paul know what I'm talking about if you're heading from South St. Paul. Number two leading listenership, St. Paul, where you at? But if you're going over that bridge into downtown St. Paul, you're like, why is this always backed up? And my wife complains about it every single time. And I'm like, well, if you've ever had to manage a city's traffic flow, it's not so simple as adding more lanes or better go send a lobbyist to DC, bro. There we are. But uh yeah, so you know it's it's it's a very fun game. It can be kind of hard to get into at first, but it's something that we have both really enjoyed playing. So, like, just some highlights. Generally, what are some things that you would point out as like reasons you really like this game or things that really excite you about the game? It is uh I mean you kind of touched it a little bit on the whole time warp or time traveling thing. It's just there's something about it where you get sucked in and you just it's it's almost cathartic, I would say. Yeah. Like to watch, you know, to be plugging away and just to see, you know, the graphics are pretty decent in it too. And like to be honest, like I played SimCity back in the day, like all iterations except for the online one. And this one is just like a very polished version of that, so it taps into a nostalgic thing for me as well.

Luke 18:18

Oh, cool.

Alex 18:18

Where because as a kid, I you know, I really enjoyed SimCity. Now, uh, for this though, I think it's just seeing the success of your city because I had played roughly 10 hours of this game prior to the podcast, prior to you, you know, the jokes about dragging me when he wanted me to do this a while ago. But uh, but the thing is, is I had played this game before. I knew I liked this game, and I have been excited to play it, and it has been a really good experience playing it for this uh past month's game. I think what I really the biggest highlight for me is I approach this more at I was like, I'm gonna play this game and I'm gonna have a I'm gonna make my city pop. I'm gonna I had high aspirations of hitting a male population, not a not a chance. Yeah, I had to let them know that doesn't really happen unless you're really into it, really. Right, right. Mobs and that sort of things. The point is, though, is in the past, like I had plugged away and I never had got into man, this this game is deep. Like the surface, you look at it and surface level, you're like, okay, I can figure this out. But then even the other day, you came over and you like showed me some weird stuff. I was like, I didn't even know you could do that, or no, like I didn't even bother to try and do that to see how much it would impact how much my population growth was going, uh, or how my population growth was doing, etc. But for me, this time around, like it's the most successful city that I've ever built in this game, right? So for me, that's a major highlight because I've usually will build a city and shit will hit the fan, and all of a sudden I'm like, well, I'll just start over and make a new city and see how that goes. This time I really stuck to my city and I w really wanted to learn the learn what was happening and like what I could do. And to be honest, I paid there's uh three little bars that show you a need, it's their like need meters for your commercial, your industrial, and your residential zones, and I really paid attention to those this time. So instead of like over sustainable growth, man. Right. So instead of over-exerting myself and like really trying to like throw down a bunch of residential zones just to like force uh people to move in, I really paced myself and paid attention to what the city's needs were according to those meters, and I I found success doing that. Uh it's funny because I looked at your city and you we had been sharing on Discord the progress you had streamed it, I had helped you through some things, and then I came back like quite a few hours later and you had made massive progress. And you start off with one square or plot of land, right? For lack of a better term. As you as you upgrade, you can buy bigger plots of land and expand. But I noticed you did something that's uh that's very prominent in the online communities within some, is that you never moved on to another plot of land, you never expanded your city until you had totally maxed out that first square. Oh, yeah.

Luke 20:55

Well, I am a Virgo bro.

Alex 20:57

I am too, but I never do that. So like you were very much going and creating in that like ship in a bottle type vibe where it was just like that perfectly it's almost like a bonsai tree. Where you were just like pruning your branches and making your first initial area like so perfect, and that really like that kind of tickled me because it it reminds me of when I first got into this game, there was such there's so many failures, first of all. And you're constantly figuring things out, you're starting things over, but there's just there's a hook in you of watching that growth. Like, so to better explain, you literally plot some residential land through like a bit of a time lapse, they show like little houses getting built and people moving in. And you can actually they call them Sims for little simulations, but you can actually click on a person, you can scroll in with your mouse, and you can see like a little character model, they'll give you like a name, the person's occupation, where they're going, and you can click this little button and it'll have you like it'll be like this is Marcy. She is a well-educated adult on her way to the fruit bar and gym.

Luke 21:54

Right.

Alex 21:54

And you can watch them navigate your city from basically just hovering above them, third person. And like the deeper you get into the game, like maybe you built a bunch of bike paths that connect your city. You had me watch, you had me watch all these people. We followed her on her bike and she was headed to the gym. Yeah. But she biked all the way across the city. And she did it. It was just so funny to me because I was like, this girl is biking all the way across the city. Two or three miles just to get to the bike. More than that, dude. Like she was the 10-mile bike ride plus to get to the gym. Just to get to the gym. I was like, that's dedication. She's probably fit. Yeah, she's very fit. Um big breakthrough moment for me in this game, to be honest. And one of the reasons why I really stuck with this time is because I or well, you actually gave me a little bit of tutorial on roads. Because previously my my traffic flow was terrible because I would always do I would start my city with just uh two-lane roads, right? Yeah. So I I pretty much like put two lane roads by the wayside and started building four ways right away, and that helped a lot. Yeah, and that's gonna kind of transition us. So we talked about some of the things we love about the game. Some lowlights, and these lowlights are very much to like one, this is usually the type of stuff we talk about, but two, like these are things that as a teacher or someone trying to use this game, even as just a general player, you have to address these things in order for successful implementation. The game doesn't do the greatest job teaching you how to play it. No, nor does it immediately give you some of the things that would be very helpful. Even myself, I remember trying to teach myself like how to set up my initial roads and growth. Sure. And I had to jump right into YouTube. Thankfully, there's such a huge like infrastructure or just basically a huge player base ready to teach. Right. But outside of that, I would have struggled, and like you didn't quite tap into that as much as I did. No, I had my I have a mentor over here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he jokes, but the first time he played, he was like, I don't know, it's like kind of okay. And I came over to his house and he's like, I have like seven trash dumps, and I have a population of like before the uh before the pod, but yeah, it's true. Yeah, like seven trash dumps. We call we we affectionately call it trash city now. And you're like, but none of these houses are getting trash pickup. Like, why is there trash not? It was so frustrating to me. I was like, why do I have a trash problem in my city? I have so many, so many dumps, like I don't understand. And I just kind of giggled and I was like, Road hierarchy, man. And you're like, excuse me, and you're like, I ran in, and then I and then it's I stopped acting like such a professional. I was like, no, I ran into some of the same issues. Six-lane roads need to lead into four-lane roads, they need to lead into two-lane roads, and you need access for all these super important infrastructural things throughout your city. Now, I say this in one of the companion pods, it's something that I drive home a lot. There is not a conversation more boring than road hierarchy. Unless you're deep into these skylines. So if you're a teacher and you want to teach your kids the importance of some boring things like why this is located there, and like they're teenagers, they're they have a lot of things on their mind. You get them hooked on a game like this, you give them access to these things. So you have an outlet to have these types of learnings and conversations and understanding of your community. But back to the lowlights, it is difficult to start. Even you have to like open up like some water, you need to provide water and electricity to your citizens. That's like the first thing you need to handle. That's the only thing they give you access to, but no one tells you, like, okay, so go to your city's river, grab the water from upstream, right, dump the water, your waste. If you don't have a river, you have to use uh a water tower. Water towers, yeah. And the problem is you have to get rid of your water too. Right. So if you accidentally flip that and you have your water waste upstream and your water draw downstream, you will poison your citizens. They will have unclean, safe well, like they have unclean water, so you like need to fix that. But once you get some of those things. There's ways to clean that later, it's crazy. There is, yes. And it doesn't look aesthetically pleasing. Is there any other things that you think are like kind of a flaw within the game or something that you didn't enjoy while you played? Yeah. Well, for me, I think it's you've already touched on it a little bit, but it's just the idea that well, it's just the fact that the game doesn't hold your hand super hard. So like, unless you are tapping into an online community or have someone like you to help with some of these pain points, it was frustrating. It was frustrating to not understand why my trash wasn't picked up. Recently, I had you take a look at my city, which is doing quite well, about 50,000 population. But I have a whole bunch of people dying, and I've read about this, and I don't want to get into the weeds on it, but essentially, uh one of the things that we found out is that I have certain on-ramps and off-ramps going from my highway that there's a huge traffic congestion, and that that's one main thing that is stopping my hearses from picking up. Saving your hospitals from getting sick. Right. So it turns out that I have to essentially, as I continue this, I'm gonna have to rezone some areas and redo my road hierarchy just to be able to, but it's that's how intricate this game is, though. Even though you can zoom in and see these things, and most of the time you're zoomed way out, you're like way above God mode or whatever, right?

Luke 26:48

Yeah.

Alex 26:48

But if you zoom in, you can see these things, and if you click on the buildings, it'll give you stats on them. And I didn't even know until you showed me that when you click on either a funeral, either the uh incinerator, like a funeral home incinerator building, or a cemetery, it shows this is the amount of hearses we have going around your city. This is our capacity and how many we're able to do. Yeah, it's that way for all the infrastructure, like hospitals, um, schools, even they'll tell you how many students they can hold. Right. So if you now if you go in and you click on that, then you can start adjusting your city's budget, and that will actually dynamically change the amount of hearses, for example, that are going out into the or the amount of the amount of ambulances that are maybe able to go out, or the amount of fire trucks that are able to maybe handle like the fires happening in the city. It's wild, dude. Yeah, and but it's just you learn through so much failure. But it's frustrating if you don't know. Yeah, and sometimes like we were able to video chat, and I just kind of I was hanging out, you know, I had some time and I was just kind of patiently talking you through some different concepts that I've picked up. So then it really stresses like this game, I truly believe could be a really cool educational tool. The problem is that the teacher needs to teach the game and through the game. And that's a huge distinction. Like you cannot just give this to a student and be like, you're gonna learn so much. You have to teach them how to play. And you also have to like teach them actual concepts, have lesson plans, have a goal, have missions in mind. So with that in mind, once again, I kind of teased it earlier, but this project, I focused on three lenses as a social studies teacher. A first being when I was playing games like this, but also like my other nerdy city building management historical themed games. I kind of just started to really think about three main lenses of which these games are really powerful within school. The first being like social studies concepts. What about what I actually teach as a social studies teacher or what I know from my license? What is actually like some real concepts that I can see and pull out from these games? The second one being job training and inspiration. So when I went into schooling, all I really thought of social studies that you could do was like be a teacher or be a historian. Although I like being a teacher, I kind of look back with a little bit of sadness, being like, man, I I wish I would have known about some of these other avenues, some of these other creative outlets and like combinations of my desires. So like I could be kind of correcting that. So if we got students playing these games, that might inspire them to be civil engineers, city planners, those types of things. And it's just like what type of careers can we inspire out of kids, and what kind of actual career skills can we give kids? And then the third is more akin to my environmental education lens that I was looking at is city skylines actually can be used very much so to teach environmental concepts, pro-environmental concepts, all the way from pollution management to like the importance of public spaces and green spaces for kids.

Luke 29:36

Sure.

Alex 29:37

So with that in mind, social studies, specifically human geography, that's like our relationship to the world and the world's relationship to us. So like land use you start off with a big plot of land, you have natural resources. There is spatial relationships within these games. Those are all super important concepts to understanding human society and how we've gotten to the way we are. And it's crucial for this game. So resource management, human systems, we've been talking about them a lot, but you have to set up schools, you have to make sure your citizens have jobs, you have to set up healthcare facilities. Like this game teaches infrastructure amazingly and give it makes it actually like interesting for a student to learn about not just the city they're making, but that gives them a new lens of which to see the city that they like live in. I mean that ranges all the way to like industries. So we're talking about like the forestry industry, you can do a bunch of farming, all those types of things. It also gets into politics and government, albeit a little weaker in the sense that you set up taxes and policies and can kind of change some of the laws of your city. So although that might be introductory, like it's a great way of like, all right, so what if we change this law? What happens when you raise these taxes? You get more money, but your citizens start to move out, they might not be as happy. Then going on to environmental themes. There is the growing green expansion, which introduces a bunch of different environmental, renewable energy sources as well as waste management sources. In the base game, when you have your trash pickups, they pollute in the area all around them. So even like if you put your residential houses next to the pollution, your citizens get sick. They die and they move. Right. You're you have to be really smart about where you place things. That helps you understand the city around you. And then in the ex going green expansion, they like introduce you to new environmental concepts that are like very cool. So there's more green focused buildings like renewable energy, but also like gardens and like not having green lawns but having more like eco friendly lawns. Like that's the type of details it gets into. Uh, there's also fun to be from like that sky mode and then design. Zoom up and see those buildings and like all the it's it's really fun to see and all the solar panels and wind farms you got going and you can do uh you can do zoning to for like different neighborhoods, right? Yeah. And so with that particular expansion, the going green expansion that you've mentioned, if you have that expansion added to the base game, you can actually go in and what do you call it again where you can uh you can click um and make it you can make certain things uh residential specialization. Oh so that whole yeah, yeah. So that whole area is gonna have green, efficient buildings, and they give you little trade-offs too. Like there might be higher taxes.

Luke 32:05

Sure.

Alex 32:06

Or higher uh yeah, and it would be like higher taxes, but you have like lower energy bills.

Luke 32:10

Right.

Alex 32:10

So your citizens, so there's like little trade-offs. So even then it teaches you, or like the renewable energy sources might be more expensive initially, but they don't pollute, they raise the property value, and you don't run out of things and it doesn't cost you as much long term. There's interesting little things, and there's just like little moments, jumping off points you could be talking about with your students. Even in the industries, you can like drill up oil, but oil is a finite source in this game, so you will run out, and it's pretty frustrating. Whereas with the farming and the forestry industry, that is a renewable thing, and it keeps going, and you don't run out of trees, you don't run out of the farming equipment. Right on. So that's like kind of a fun thing, and the conversations you could be having about like how is your city set up, how are you like using the resources around you responsibly? Yeah, there's so many layers to this game, and it's fun, like you bring up the the industries aspect of it. So either is you can bring up the sidebar and then you can uh have it map out certain things and it will tell you if you have like an oil-rich. How did I forget about all those beautiful overlays? Right. So, like as a geography nerd myself, like looking at your map and then using the different overlays that shows you what's your traffic like, what are the hot spots, what's the pollution like, where is it really bad, what's the sound pollution like? Like, I don't think a lot of kids would really think about sound pollution, but like as someone who used to live in the armpit of two highways, I had like instead of an ocean breeze, I had just two highways humming at all times, and that kind of sucks, right? Yeah, it's kind of funny because it's you know, as we were mentioning earlier, you you know, a lot of the stuff you kind of as you play with the game, you start to realize, oh, this is something I could be doing or should have been doing this whole time. And the for a good example for me is uh I didn't really know that I could be there's like oil-rich parts of my map, and then there's like uh a very fertile, like I realized after the after I had built like my downtown area. Sure, I realized that I built my downtown on top of the most fertile like part of my map. I was like, oh man. So the overlays help you understand how to use the map too. So like there's some map application there, and then just like managing your growth and overall quality of life, even just connecting that like when you build basketball courts, when you build volleyball courts, city parks, public libraries, like citizen happiness goes up. So, once again, giving these mindsets in social studies learning and environmentalism and how they kind of blend it together, and how like what you want out of your community kind of gives you that new lens of which you can honestly look at your world or maybe look for improvement in yours, which kind of brings us to job identity. There's a YouTuber that I've watched a bunch of his videos, literally called a city planner plays, and his video series on a city planner plays, city skylines was like kind of a fun validating moment because one I learned about road hierarchy and all those things, but two, I'm like actual civil engineers and city planners like love this little sandboxed plan.

Luke 34:55

Sure.

Alex 34:55

Like, what does that tell you about the validity of this game within that sphere? They do this for fun, and I, a casual gamer, also do this for fun. So, like, there's some real skills and concepts that they're using and like putting in the game. This gets into identity and like how you see yourself, how you see your community around you, what you see yourself as potentially doing and the type of learning you might like to do. So, you know, hit our identity articles for that one. And then there's the idea of this is not an epistemic game, an epistemic game is a game built for educational purposes, but it's almost specifically with like the limitations and the real life things of those, but this is almost like a teasing and entry point into those types of games. The big idea here is that you're exposing students or players to just new experiences, mindsets, and skills. Uh you can see the world differently, understand the communities you live in more, and potentially get inspired to get into the field that like you're emulating in this moment, which is pretty cool. Right, right. Lastly, there's also a piece of equity that kind of built gets built into this once you bring it into the schools. Because I am a very specific type of individual. Uh, if we're looking at my identity, like grew up kind of middle class, white male. They're generally encouraged to get more into engineering and these types of things, and we have a lot of these STEM initiatives to get all types of kids into engineering and all these types of things, both girls, children of color, all these types of different demographics and groups. So if we brought a game like this into the school earlier when I said this could get you to look at your community in a different type of way, or get you into that field, if we kind of gave that mindset and those tools to all students, I think you would see those fields diversify and more kids being exposed to that positive influence, which is pretty cool. Right. I know you said this is an epistemic game, so it's not a game that was made purely for the purpose of education or whatever. But I do love the idea of bringing it in, like you're saying, to figure out a way to bring it in the classroom and obviously taking it as an angle as a and an educator to use it as a tool to teach your students because I do think that you know it has the potential to really ignite the the you know certain students' passion for city planning, honestly. Yeah, and all those different things that a city needs to write, crisis management, everything, you know, problem solving, it's a great tool. Yeah, and like it's also a ton of fun, and it could be a really cool club thing to do, or like you could just use it as a part of your teaching. So, like I think about if you want to look at the way different cities in the world are laid out, right? Give the kids a reason to care about this, have them build their own cities, give them inspiration. Like maybe you're having class and you're like, all right, so today we're building. Tomorrow we're gonna look at like what's New York City like. Sure. What's Austin, Texas like? Yeah, yeah. What is what does Berlin Germany look like? Looking at at their landscape and the resources afforded to them, like maybe why is it that a city was built this way? It's it's a super cool, it's be a super cool companion piece to have with your with your lessons. Yeah, and understanding just the relationship between the world and the people and how our environment has shaped the way that we live, or how the way we live is shaping the environment. All wonderful things, but you know, seriousness aside, I just like to nerd out in this game. I just like to build and build and build, and like I've bought a bunch of the expansions when they go on sale. So really I'm building a low five city right now. Yeah, and I have low five tech, it's a technical college. There you go. And I'm expanding the campus and it's looking pretty beautiful. I like it. I have a pristine national park going and a zoo. It's pretty sweet, dude. Nice. My city's called Blavakin. Which is a super nerdy butcher. We have at least one butcher in residence. Oh lord. All right. No, no, it's been fun, man. I've been enjoying this game a lot. You know, it's not for everybody though. And that's you know, that's the case with all games, but it's also a good thing to keep in mind, you know, because we're talking about bringing this game and using it as an educational supplement, right?

Luke 38:37

Yeah.

Alex 38:38

Uh, but that's not gonna work for all students. We've got a good homie, friend of the pod Ace, who gave it a college try and was like, you know what, boys, I'm uh just not really getting into this one. Yeah. And you know, that's all right, that makes sense. Any point to a different game? You know what, though, he didn't have you handled like you did for me. So but also I don't think he wanted that. Yeah, fair enough. So like he's playing mini motorways, which is funny. I was like, you're playing a different traffic management puzzle game? Like what? But he was just talking about how like that's more that's more focused, that's more specific. There's a lot going on. This can be overwhelming. So I definitely think you would have to go in with the idea that you're uh that you'd have to be an expert, you in your specific case, or whoever's looking to teach this, uh, and then you're in turn then able to teach your students. Not only are you teaching them how to play, but you're teaching them why and how, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so it it is a tool. Definitely, it is a wonderful tool, and hopefully, you know, once we get more people familiar with the idea of using it, we can start to work on training and like nailing down how to do it perfectly. I love it. And in the meantime, I'm gonna work on getting that one mil population. One mil population. Let's get to 100,000. Right on. Well, with that, dude, let's uh let's take a little break here from our unsanctioned sponsor, and then we're gonna come back with our side quests. Our non-sanctioned sponsor is the celebratory meal that you eat when you finally get done with grad school and you get jury duty afterwards, so you don't really have too much time to just relax. But hey, you did it, you done survived, you're gonna be fancy, even though life keeps throwing things at you, and you had to buy a new water heater that I didn't plan for nor want, but I need hot water. Unsanctioned sponsor, stress management. What are you doing to manage your stress? What are you doing? Are you just ramping to your break? Yeah, right. Side shout out to the uh Taco Rendos that we were at design. Taco Riendo butt. Yeah, some mole, twin city spots, mole, let me know. I love me some mole. That chimichonga was fire. I don't have any regrets. Yeah, he's a chimichonga guy. I'm a mole and chilata guy. That's all right, man. But you know, for real though, stress management. You know, you got a lot going on in your life. I'm I'm talking to Luke and I'm talking to the audience and myself introspectively. But you know, there's some things I've been trying to do is uh work on my routines, be a little bit more mentally cognizant of my actions. That's too mature. I'm talking about celebrating eating with ramen, fancy stuff actually trying to hit that bicycle. Also, I can eat that chimmy changa, bruh. No, you get on that bicycle so you can bike 12 miles to the local gym and juice bar and then bike 12 miles home just like your Simmons City skylines. True, true. But to be for real, it's I get on that bike so I can bike to the local brewery and have myself a brew. Hey, we're we're adults here. That's okay. Support your local businesses. Hey, do what you need to do. Manage that stress. All right, welcome back. Hopefully, you the listener are getting some good ideas of how to manage some stress. I've been rambling, doing my my Mr. Teacher Guy routine up in front of the class. I had a PowerPoint in front of Alex letting him know all of the great ideas, the reasons that we should be teaching through video games. Indeed. But for a little bit of fun here, I'm gonna set him up. He's had to listen to me for a while. What are some games you've been playing, friend? Dude, I've been side questing. You know, I've been playing Skylines, but it's not the only game on the docket, even though it is super easy to just all of a sudden be like, oh no, where'd that time go? Where'd the time go? But I, as mentioned earlier, finished Red Dead finally, well, finally, you know, whatever. I finished Red Dead Redemption 2. Yeah. Straight up. Big game. Finished the epilogue, did everything. I think my percentage is like 89, 90 ish percent. I'm close. I did a lot of side quests. You gotta go fishing in that. Gotta get the legendaries too. Do a bunch of fishing, but I did some fishing. I mean, the game's wild, man. Like it is when it when it puts you in front of a beautiful river, you're by some mountain, and it's like dusk or dawn, and you're like, I better pull out my fishing pole. Geez. But uh, but I did finish it, man. I loved it. And we're gonna talk more about the story, a bunch of spoiler-heavy stuff in that one. So it also will be mentioned in our companion pods is believe it or not, this cowboy simulator has some cool educational concepts and some like actual academic work that has been done on it. But I bring it up because I needed to start a new open world game. I always like having one open world game going on at a time, right?

Luke 43:02

Yeah.

Alex 43:02

And Assassin's Creed Origins is the one that I decided. It's one that I had started a while ago, but I never really got too deep into it. I've been playing more of it because I want to knock it out before I go on to um Odyssey. And it's been a lot of fun. It's been fun to revisit the Assassin's Creed world. I love uh a lot of aspects of that game, I think, uh just as a as far I there's things I don't like about it. I don't like the the fetch questing that happens in it. But I guess I do though. It's kind of one of those weird relationships. You're like, do I like this when you're going to point A to point B? It feels like a bit of a job, but it's also kind of but it's a beautiful scenery and it's cool, and like the gameplay of it is fun, and I've been really enjoying this one. I think it's uh you know, I'm excited to to plow through it and just really enjoy my time in Egypt. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's super fun to be in those super accurate simulations, and you'll you'll hear me talk about mine in a bit here, because I'm also playing an Assassin's Creed game. Right on. And uh I've also started Stray, the cat game. Yeah. And it's been cool, dude. Uh I'm not super far into it. I sure are, and for good reason, man. It is a cool game. And it's fun, it's fun to watch that cat just run around, do its thing. Be a cute little tabby orange cat. Yeah, dude. I mean, uh to roleplay as a cat, never really thought. I'm there's more than just cat and dog people out there. I understand you can like both, but you know, I identify as a dog person, I guess. Well, I'm allergic to here. Full disclosure, I'm allergic to cats, so dogs are gonna win for me. But you know what? I've been enjoying this game, and it's been perfect for me to play on that uh Steam Deck. You're a mess. Perfect. It's been perfect to play on the Steam Deck, dude. It's the it's the it's the quintessential Steam Deck game, throwing it out there right now. What else, man? You know I got other things going on, and I have to bring up the play date. I mentioned that in my in my side quest the other the other month, and I just gotta bring it up again because the play date is this small, quirky little handheld that came out to the market not too long ago, a couple months back, and it is working on a a season pass type uh plan for the games. Yeah. So I think there's 25, 24-ish games or whatever that that come with season one, and they give you two games a time once a week. And it has been at first, I was like, uh, I don't know, like it's kind of like these two games they gave me, are they alright? And and then the second week, I was like, oh, these ones, this one's I like this one, you know, whatever. But it's really nice because this handheld is it's perfect for one, it's perfect playing outside. Like it's like the screen is beautiful in the sun. It's like a weird thing to say, but uh honestly, the screen's very crisp, but it's not backlit, so it's like one of those things where you can't play in the dark, but you can play outside, which is kind of cool. So it's like cool, throw it in the little pocket, bring out to the backyard, do whatever. Uh, and it's got the little crank on there, so the cranks like involved in a bunch of these games. I'm up to about 18. I think my my library is about 18 games now, and there's not a single game that there's only one that I've beat so far, and there's two or three of them that are pretty arcadey that I like to play a bunch, but I love being able to dabble, like it really lets me um dabble in these different types of games, and it's it is really fun every week to get the two and be like, oh, what's up with this one? And it's interesting to see which ones I can go back to and which ones I'll eventually knock off the list. You initially complained about that delivery method, and I was like, that kind of gives you a chance to just have time with those games and not get too distracted or caught up. So I think it's actually it's actually genius, and I know I've been reading some of their blogs and stuff, and I know that playdate is they're they're deciding if they want to continue that uh the season pass thing, yeah. Uh where they release it that way, and I hope they do because honestly, if I got all those games at once, I probably would have been over this like thing and been like there it just sits on my desk. But now I have a reason to make sure to check in on it once a week, and it's just it allows me to dabble with those games more than I would have if it was just like boom, here's all the games. Yeah. Well, for me, MLB the show. I talked about it last time. I'm playing way too much of it. I'm not sure what's funny is our early on podcasts from last year, if not the year prior, I was talking about MLB the show and how I feel like an old man and then they're not making these games for me anymore. And I don't know if I'm just in more of a baseball mood because the twins are actually better this year, or if it's just been a better game, or if I've just accepted the changes and had some fun with them. But very much into the game this year. It's a ton of fun. Uh Luke Dukes, pitcher, shohe otani type. I pitch, I play third base, I crush home runs. Nice. I play for the Marlins because that's who I got drafted by. So I always go go fish. Yeah, and I go, go fish, because that's their whole thing. So uh I annoy my wife, and when uh I'm playing and she's on the couch, uh, if I hit a home run, I'll go go fish, and I try to get her to high five. I mean, she's always super entertained. Uh high five and dude, this is low five gaming, bro. Oh no. Oh no. Uh and then I also am playing podcast high five games. High five gaming. Go fish. Um I'm playing Assassin's Greed Valhalla, which is the newest one instead of ancient Egypt. It is uh like you're a Viking, right? You're a Viking. I'm it's probably medieval, I want to say, but like England. Okay. You set up a settlement in that's clunky, but you set up a settlement in England as these Vikings who left Norway for reasons that I don't need to get into. But it's pretty cool. It's like there's a lot to do, but I I just love those historical sim games, and I wanted something on the new Xbox that looked real fancy. Ah yes. And like with Origins, man, is it always a perfect game? No. But those games might not be perfect, but you're in such beautiful historical settings. The environments are so cool, dude. Yeah, and throughout my work, both research-wise and like some of my written stuff for this project, Assassin's Creed comes up, it's a big influence on me, so I always kind of enjoy going back. And even though they're flawed games, they're pretty sweet. Dude, that's awesome. I can't wait to get through uh Origins so I can move on to Odyssey. I might skip. What's the one in between? Is there one in between? Oh no, I would have to go back to the Syndicate, but I've been I guess you tell me not to. Yeah, don't even don't even know. If anybody out there just heard that is like, dude, you better play Syndicate, let us know. Holler at us in the Discord, shoot us an email at hello at LoFivegaming.com. Also go head out uh to the website, low5aming.com, to check out the articles that Luke was mentioning. Uh some great work. Check out those articles, and then also check out our three companion pods that uh have also been released and have to do with this project as a whole. We'd love to hear your feedback and we'd love you to join into the conversation with us. So again, check those out, hit us up, get at us via social media, all this stuff you can find on the website. So lowfivegaming.com. Thanks again for listening. It's really cool. Oh, dude, we just did an episode on Skylines. I have to, I have to I have to list this off. These cities are the cities in which we've had the most listens for low five gaming. Number one, Minneapolis. Number two, St. Paul. Twin cities, our hometowns. Thanks to all the friends, fam that have kept the MSP on top. But right after that, we've got Montreal, then San Antonio, then Sydney. Pretty cool. Listeners all over the world, and it's super dope to see people tuning in from all over the place. Listen to Lo Five. Yeah, and Soul, I know you have a bomb. I know you have a bomb Skyline, Soul. Get your numbers up so we can get the same. That's right. Where are you at? I'd love to be posting Skyline pictures of Soul. So share with your friends for the homies that are in Seoul right now. Till next time, y'all. Peace.

Luke 50:48

There's an NBA show I like to watch, and he does an AMSMR analysis, and he has a better acronym than that, but I actually hate the segment. What the fuck was that like? They're always like opening again. Like I fucking hate all the open again. I was just trying to explain like what they did. That was gross. Oh, that is gross. Okay, I'm done.

Alex 51:21

Oh my god. Yeah, that was that was the limit. That was that was the limit.