Simulating+the+Physical+World

=Simulating the Physical World=

Many games create an "artificial world" with its own set of rules that players voluntarily agree to abide by (or hack if they can). One of the aspects of a game is this suspension of roles imposed by reality and/or our particular culture - where we try out different roles and different ways of being perceived and reacted to.

To the degree that we wish our games to have an impact on students beyond the screen, it's useful to consider in what ways the game might TRANSFER to the physical world out into intercultural transactions or other active settings.

How do Games "map" to the "Real World"? --

World of Warcraft has been used for teaching economics - not because of its one-to-one correspondence with trade in the "real world" - but because of its complexities as an actual working economy and all of it's complexity. It's better than Monopoly and better than many of the computer simulations that one can buy for Business Classes... by the very nature that there are several thousand (?) players on a given server / instance of WoW - each selling and trading -

What other instances of game-based play do you know of or intuit might be a good candidate for transferring that experience to other areas of Students' Lives -- or even, gasp!, on Standardized Tests?