The Unexpected Tech

Playing The News: To Push Social Gaming Forward, Two New Startups Look To The Real World

When most people think of social gaming, they likely think of Zynga and its flagship titles, like FarmVille and CityVille — or even Words With Friends. Yet, as Facebook social gaming matures (right along with mobile technology and platforms), we are starting to see studios begin to push the boundaries more, looking for new ways to engage and educate gamers, maybe even reinventing the wheel while they’re at it. One example is the New York City-based startup Playmatics, which raised $1 million last year to build a new game franchise called Shadow Government.

For those unfamiliar, beginning with mobile and later moving to Facebook, Shadow Governmentlooks to bring real-world data and modeling to the social game sphere. To do that, the startup has partnered with the Millennium Institute to leverage its economic and sustainability data, and government-modeling software to allow players to build and run their own virtual countries. The Millennium Institute is perhaps best known for its Threshold 21 (T21) software, a dynamic simulation tool that allows policy makers and development organizations to run comparative analyses of different policy scenarios, identify the policies and strategies that lead to their desired developmental goals.

Using this reality-based simulation model, the goal for Shadow Government is not only to create a gaming experience that is entertaining but also one that is decidedly educational. For example, the Millennium Institute wants the franchise’s games to become a part of the curriculum for K-12 education. In that sense, Shadow Government sounds like a suped-up, hyper-modern Sim City, that might even be tweaked into something that could be used to educate high school students in a civics class.