Millenium Village Simulator

I got very invested in this game very quickly. I played three times, and it took me a little while to get the hang of how i worked. I did not set myself up well to succeed because I misunderstand the allocation of hours, and left a large set of time as “idle” to allow for rest, not realizing that the 24 hours was a combined for both individuals, and not 24 hours in a day. As a result, the crop yield, food harvested, and water collected were not enough for the two individuals. While I made it through a few more seasons, this error ultimately led to their deaths. Over the next three rounds, I was able to keep them alive longer, however, as soon as there were three or more poor crop yields in a row, regardless of me buying fertilizer or high yield seeds, I ended up in debt and therefore unable to provide the necessary elements for the family, again resulting in their deaths. I got very attached to this family and the success of the community as a whole. While I was good at determining what limits would be beneficial for the community wood collection and fishing, I never made enough money to buy any infrastructure for the community. While this may be because I don’t have a strong understanding of what an appropriate tax rate is, I found it quite frustrating how expensive infrastructure is. Overall, I think in order to succeed, there is a lot that I would need to learn to successfully help my family and community survive, but I do think I learned from my failures, similar to what was discussed in Dorner. I frequently failed, but was able to quickly learn from my mistakes. However, there are likely many components that I failed to see that were more indirect problems that appeared as a result of solving others. Dorner claims that failure in such a scenario does not occur from one moment or one mistake, but happens gradually overtime. this was very apparent in how I could see my family and community deteriorate slowly, but not until it seemed a little too late to come back from effectively or sustainably.

2 thoughts on “Millenium Village Simulator

  1. Evie Hanson

    I completely agree – I was getting so invested in their lives which I was not expected and only seemed to get more and more frustrated with every attempt as I did not understand what I was doing wrong. Right when I thought that I figured out the right balance of farming or water or anything else, something else seemed to go awry. I kept learning from one mistake, only to make another mistake which really just seemed like I was going in a circle of failure as I altered one factor which then affected another (and so on and so forth).

  2. Regan McCrossan

    I agree with you as well, I feel as though it takes a couple of times to really get the hang of the game. I find it very interesting that we all found failure and we all found it in separate ways. In order to find success, there needs to be be many things learned. Ultamatley, those mistakes couldn’t be fixed until after the villagers died.

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