An Atwar Education?

Intro
I know I sound like a low-life… making 2 proposals in one day… for this game… but I promise it will be good.

As we all know, atwar has been pretty stagnant for some time. That's fine. What Dave seems to have been doing over the past 3 years (and Ivan & Amok before him) is consolidating atwar's platform to make it more refined, accessible, and appealing to new folks, as well as balancing the interests of existing players with the interests of brand new players.

What I'm suggesting here would involve expanding atwar's platform into the domain of education, covering both history and geography. I'm very excited about this because I think it has so much potential.

Personal Experience
(skip this first paragraph if you want) I first joined atwar when I was around 15 years old, and at that time I sucked at geography and history. I was just starting high school and knew absolutely nothing about the thousands of years of history that preceded my birth. Which is kind of funny when you think about it. But anyway, atwar helped me tremendously. Within about 6 months, I memorized every country in Europe and Asia. I still don't know some of Africa, but I know what is important. Aetius's maps also taught me a whole lot about history. I barely knew anything about WW1 until I started to play his maps. Rome? Don't even get me started. I knew nothing about Rome. But playing historical maps definitely taught me more about history than school did.

Surely, my atwar experience included some educational benefit. Here's the focal question: how can we extract that part of my experience and transform it into an entire platform dedicated to lessons in history and geography?

Proposal (basic structure and configuration)
What I propose is this: a new game mode. Right next to "Quick", "Casual," and "Tutorial" should be the mode "Education" that appears when directed to the page atwar-game.com/games/. When logged in under regular player credentials, in education mode you should see a bunch of boxes consisting of scenarios similar to what you see in other modes. But these boxes should not require a player to host them. Instead, these boxes (aka educational "scenarios") should be pre-arranged and pre-made by developers in specific static locations on the interface. There should be no lobby; instead, players should go straight to the picking phase of the scenario upon clicking it and should start picking. Since each scenario is displayed in only one location on the interface, they should have infinite sessions. For example, a scenario in this mode that requires 4 players will be displayed in a box in one location and if 96 players join all at once atwar will register 24 sessions (96 / 4) of the same educational scenario, but there will not be 24 boxes; instead, there will be 1 box with 24 sessions.

This is just so that regular users can partake in the education mode of atwar, which I'm about to outline in much more detail. But before I do, I will add that we should also allow classrooms, not just individuals, to utilize the education mode. To this end, teachers or educational institutions and students should have special login credentials and their contact with atwar support should be streamlined.

In summary, there should be three login credentials: teacher login, student login, and player (individual) login. Verified teachers and educational institutions should have special permissions that allow them to host a "classroom" that gives them access to a code that their students can use to login (this code is part of the credentials for student login, like Kahoot). When the teacher sees that all her students have logged into her virtual "classroom," then she can proceed to put her students into an educational scenario. When the teacher puts them into an educational scenario, regular users should be barred from entering the session when they join the educational scenario. So there will be two session types.

The teacher should have the option to randomize where her students go in the scenario or allow them to pick for themselves. The teacher should also be a spectator (the only spectator). In regular sessions, there are no spectators unless you (Dave/developer) would like to let regular players see a bunch of rows listing the sessions that are up for a given educational scenario, thereby allowing regular players to spectate regular sessions. Of course, teacher sessions should not be visible to anyone; therefore, the only spectator would be the teacher.

Proposal (details and content)
When the educational scenario itself starts for both session types, the chat function should be disabled. There should be no chat function in educational scenarios except for maybe "system" chat, which is basically what you see when you login to atwar "Entering channel: Lobby. Please be polite to fellow players. Cheers!"

As for the content, these scenarios should be reminiscent of the tutorial. The scenario should play out like a regular scenario (let's say, Aetius WW1), but there should be an avatar (like Sun Tzu in the tutorial) that is consistent with your side (let's say you pick Germany, so you will have Kaiser Wilhelm II as your avatar). He will give a bunch of captions at the beginning of the turn that you must click through, and he will guide you on his thoughts of the war and recommend what moves you should make next against your opponents. There should also be ways to click on soldiers around your country to see what their thoughts are on the war, and they can provide interactive captions of their own. This will be highly educational and give players deep educational insight into certain wars, like WW1 and even ancient wars.

This will require a dedicated team of supporters to make the specialized scenarios (Aetius WW1 won't suffice) and write historical content for the avatars. I think that this will generate so much activity that it will make your head spin. Everybody is gonna be working so hard to make atwar an educational hub.

Cost/Benefit Analysis and Logistics
Atwar would of course have to reach out to schools and teachers, which might work on a very local level first, but with community help this should be easy. We all remember our history teachers from high school and middle school. We need to step it up as a community and reach out to them and let them know about this opportunity. I would contact my history teachers from my high school if Dave gave us a formatted letter to send them. It should work out just fine once everything is put into motion. And with so many new young, fresh faces coming in as students, many of them will become regular users and enjoy the game for all its features

This will be a major undertaking. With everything else that Dave is doing, I doubt it would come to fruition in the 5 year outlook. But I believe that this should be implemented sooner. Perhaps before the end of 2023. This proposal is not ordinary, it would revolutionize atwar. Surely, more developers are out there who would want to take advantage of this opportunity along with Dave? Surely, with this opportunity, hiring additional developers would be worthwhile? Surely, in our community, there are developers who would want to help? And with more developers, this could be completed at orders of magnitude the speed. THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!

As Dave continues to consolidate atwar's platform and add features, this will only add to the possibilities in the education mode. If Dave adds in a bunch of other proposals like stamina, food shortages, etc., then that would enable an even more accurate simulation of history. I'm very excited and I hope Dave sees this. I will try to reach out to him to make sure he looks over it because, I don't know about you, but everything about this proposal makes me very excited about the possibilities for the future of atwar in this decade.

I think an idea that could be implemented faster and more realistically but will still help people learn history/geography would be something like the feature in Age of Empires 2.
It had a special section for history so whenever you got bored of playing you would go there and read about who the hell were these Saracens i just played with, what in the world is an Trebuchet and who was this dude Saladin. Its safe to say i also learned geography from AW but not so much history since it lacked these features.
The good thing with this is that it can be implemented way easier and also it can be outsourced to the map makers.
For example Nifty will make a scenario on the Thirty Years' War and when he is finished he will have access to this History Tab and he will be able to add a little bit of background to the story for people that aren't really familiar with this part of history like: Why did this war happen ? What weapons were used ? What was the outcome? etc...

Escrito por Ghostface, 27.12.2021 at 09:37

I think an idea that could be implemented faster and more realistically but will still help people learn history/geography would be something like the feature in Age of Empires 2.
It had a special section for history so whenever you got bored of playing you would go there and read about who the hell were these Saracens i just played with, what in the world is an Trebuchet and who was this dude Saladin. Its safe to say i also learned geography from AW but not so much history since it lacked these features.
The good thing with this is that it can be implemented way easier and also it can be outsourced to the map makers.
For example Nifty will make a scenario on the Thirty Years' War and when he is finished he will have access to this History Tab and he will be able to add a little bit of background to the story for people that aren't really familiar with this part of history like: Why did this war happen ? What weapons were used ? What was the outcome? etc...

why not just link some wiki articles

Escrito por Frieren, 27.12.2021 at 09:38

Escrito por Ghostface, 27.12.2021 at 09:37

why not just link some wiki articles

You could leave them at the end as sources , but generally they are bigger in volume and cover information that might be trivial or of no use to the scenario you are playing.
This tab would be more compact and you will directly find the specific information that you are interested in looking for , also keeps you immersed into the game/scenario.

Escrito por Ghostface, 27.12.2021 at 09:37

I think an idea that could be implemented faster and more realistically but will still help people learn history/geography would be something like the feature in Age of Empires 2.
It had a special section for history so whenever you got bored of playing you would go there and read about who the hell were these Saracens i just played with, what in the world is an Trebuchet and who was this dude Saladin. Its safe to say i also learned geography from AW but not so much history since it lacked these features.
The good thing with this is that it can be implemented way easier and also it can be outsourced to the map makers.
For example Nifty will make a scenario on the Thirty Years' War and when he is finished he will have access to this History Tab and he will be able to add a little bit of background to the story for people that aren't really familiar with this part of history like: Why did this war happen ? What weapons were used ? What was the outcome? etc...

This is actually one interesting and nice suggestion

Escrito por Croat, 28.12.2021 at 06:49

Escrito por Ghostface, 27.12.2021 at 09:37

I think an idea that could be implemented faster and more realistically but will still help people learn history/geography would be something like the feature in Age of Empires 2.
It had a special section for history so whenever you got bored of playing you would go there and read about who the hell were these Saracens i just played with, what in the world is an Trebuchet and who was this dude Saladin. Its safe to say i also learned geography from AW but not so much history since it lacked these features.
The good thing with this is that it can be implemented way easier and also it can be outsourced to the map makers.
For example Nifty will make a scenario on the Thirty Years' War and when he is finished he will have access to this History Tab and he will be able to add a little bit of background to the story for people that aren't really familiar with this part of history like: Why did this war happen ? What weapons were used ? What was the outcome? etc...

This is actually one interesting and nice suggestion

i agree, i personaly like to read the lore of fantasy maps or historical wars, would be cool if it was implemented in atwar

I like ghost's idea, it's more practical and much more easier to implement at the moment. But both ideas serve different purposes. If we added lore to the Sun Tzu tutorial avatar or added additional avatars on atwar's education platform, I still think that would be op even if it takes years to implement. This, coupled with other resources that should be made available on atwar's education platform, would go far beyond what most of us would want because we just want to play a game, but it has benefits for us too if it attracts a bunch of kids who would use atwar to actually learn, and then become regular users later on.

Think of it: an interactive education about war, on a website that you could also play games on if you want. That sounds awesome to me. It would be like coolmath.com if any of you remember that as a kid. Coolmath was basically a website teachers would direct you to if you're finished with your main assignments. What if history teachers did that with atwar?

Dude snowflakes should learn this game by hard we didnt have a tutorial back then.

*in my days we didnt have tutorial*