Phylomon: Redoing Pokemon with real animals, SCIENCE, and tree-hugging

Dracil

Just read about this on Pharyngula (PZ Myers' blog, of the kicked out of the Expelled movie fame). As he puts it, the evolution in Pokemon is a horrible mangling of the real thing. So some people are trying to redo it using real animals with actual science and then make it into a game. It'll pretty much use a non-commercial/open-source model.

Or this is how they put it:

“Our findings carry two messages for conservationists. First, young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or man-made), being able to at age 8 to identify nearly 80% of a sample drawn from 150 synthetic “species.” Second, it appears that conservationists are doing less well than the creators of Pokemon at inspiring interest in their subjects: During their primary school years, children apparently learn far more about Pokemon than about their native wildlife and enter secondary school being able to name less than 50% of common wildlife types. Evidence from elsewhere links loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it. People care about what they know. With the world's urban population rising by 160,000 people daily, conservationists need to reestablish children's links with nature if they are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation.”

I think it's interesting and a good project though I'm not all that optimistic about its success rate (especially with potential legal issues). But they are currently looking for art submissions if you feel like contributing to the project.

BlueDestiny

I'm all for increasing awareness of wildlife but somehow kids can pick up on edutainment and just block out any sensory input related to it.

Newres

I think the problem here is that there has to be a good game based on it in order to make people notice it. The biggest issue with edutainment games is, in my limited experience, that they want to be so accurate that it limits the gameplay. Adding a bunch of interactive elements to an abridged encyclopedia is not enough. I think if the manage to make a good game out of it, it might work, but that is quite a challenge.

cooljammer00

I remember Nolan Bushnell once discussing how kids can remember 150+ pokemon, and so they should be able to remember the periodic table.

Dracil

If they made a pokemon game where every pokemon was an element of the periodic table, they probably could.