Education Matters

Education Matters was built for the itch.io hosted ResistJam, a game jam for resisting authoritarianism. The issue that I had been wanting to make a statement about for quite some time, particularly since the Betsy Devos nomination, was about education.

I made this game to illustrate how important it is to a society for its population to be educated, and how valuable education can be. However, along the way I decided it also needed to address stereotypes about who is and isn't educated. The fact is, you cannot know how intelligent someone is by simply looking at them.

The game becomes challenging for a variety of reasons, but especially because of the economical divides between educated and uneducated people. Although you can increase taxes to your community, this decreases the happiness of individuals and may lead to some (the educated, typically) leaving the community for good. The goal of the game is to reach a prosperity level of 100%, which means your citizens must be happy, employed, and making a good income. Of course, for the citizens who are uneducated, it is much harder to achieve those things, and so you must build schools to help educate your population.

The complexity does not stop there, however. There are different qualities of schools, that cost different amounts for students to attend. Not to mention that different types of schools admit different age ranges of students, and also have different maintenance fees that sap at your income to build additional resources.

My original intent was not to include quite so many features in the game, but making it only informed me further how important it is for competent people who value education to take the help of prominent seats in government office.