Video game developer Strange Loop Games presents "Eco," a survival and ecosystem simulation game that helps teach children the value of building a civilization from scratch. Much like the popular sandbox game "Minecraft," "Eco" is an open-world multiplayer game where players are tasked with managing resources not just for their characters' survival, but also for building a thriving civilization.

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According to the game's main site, "Eco" has three aspects: ecosystem simulation, world survival, and group decision-making. The first part allows players to take advantage of thousands of inter-dependent flora and fauna within the game world. Secondly, in the process of finding means to survive and grow, players should keep from promoting deforestation, pollution and the mass extinction of species. Lastly, the game aims to make players within the server help each other through actions such as proposing laws and treaties based on scientific data generated by the virtual ecosystem.

Polygon mentions that "Eco" is backed by the U.S. Department of Education, which hopes to use the game to teach students the basic concepts of community within a thriving ecology.

The game begins with an impending disaster that gamers must survive. Strange Loop Games adds a touch of innovation in the form of a "server-wide perma death." This means that unlike titles such as "Minecraft," in where players could quit a game and reset for as many times as they want to, failure in "Eco" poses an actual threat to the game world. If players somehow fail to get together and survive the disaster while keeping the ecology intact, the cloud server they're playing on will be permanently destroyed.

The game adds even more touches of reality by providing finite resources. For instance, if gamers chop down every tree within the game world without taking an active effort to plant some, no new trees will grow in their place, and any civilization they have already built will quickly crumble. In short, while it is the players' duty to take advantage of the environment to build, they should also preserve it for future use. Pretty much standard stuff in the real world, but something that doesn't really apply for such an expansive multiplayer sandbox game.

"You're facing two existential crises simultaneously: an external threat that you must avert, and the threat of causing your own destruction," says the game's website. "A rock and a hard place."

TagsECO, Minecraft, sandbox games, strange loop games