SineRider is a game about love and graphing, built by teenagers at Hack Club and slated for release soon in 2023. This open-source project is powered by teenage hackers of all kinds: artists, musicians, programmers, storytellers… so if that's you, come join us; we need your help to make this thing real!
SineRider began its life as a Unity web game in 2014. Back then it looked like this:
The game made a minor splash… at least in the puddle where the math games swim. In 2015 it appeared at GDC's Experimental Gameplay Workshop:
After that it was covered by Rock Paper Shotgun, and recommended by James Portnow of Extra Credits:
Unfortunately, SineRider disappeared from the internet shortly after release when every major browser deprecated the NPAPI plugin structure, killing the Unity Web Player and SineRider with it. SineRider ran feral through the internet until this summer, when it was sighted by a roving gang of student hackers, ensnared in a lasso of fiendish construction, brought to heel, taught manners, groomed, and presented for your enjoyment:
Educational games go back a long way. Monopoly began as a parable about the dangers of unregulated capitalism. For thousands of years, Go has been used to convey deep truths about everything from military conquest to flood control. So as as humanity discovered the utility of computers for gaming in the mid-20th century, so too emerged bold claims about the educational potential of this new interactive frontier.
The thesis of educational gaming is clear and convincing:
- Education occurs through instruction and practice
- Video Games are natural vessels for instruction and practice
- Therefore, Video Games are natural vessels for Education
We hold the premises of this basic syllogism to be self-evident. And yet, The Oregon Trail remains as the quintessential educational video game for most of us in 2022. This raises a troubling question: why is a game first released in 1971—a year before Pong—still the archetype for an idea that was supposed to revolutionize education?
A virtually infinite landscape of refined, evocative, ever-improving titles have piled atop Pong in the last fifty years, intermingling with every other entertainment medium in an industry now bigger than Hollywood. Why have game designers had such comparatively weak influence on the world of education? Could the thesis of educational gaming be wrong after all? We don't believe so.
We the students contend that educational games fail to deliver because the incentives of this market sector contradict the very nature of what a game should be.
Educational institutions demand uniform instruction along a well-defined linear curriculum—and they want a randomized controlled longitudinal study to affirm that your product will yield a 3% bump in standardized test scores. But games are fundamentally voluntary pursuits, moreso even than books or movies. The simple paradox of institutionally-mandated play undermines the most basic needs of an effective game.
Ironically, the best evidence for the value of educational games has come from the entertainment sector. Cultural phenoms like Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program conclusively prove that it is quite possible to learn deep technical skills from a game, even when this is not a primary goal of any party involved. In fact, it almost works because this is nobody's primary goal. The primary goal is play, and learning flows naturally from playing with a deeply-technical system like orbital mechanics or Redstone.
SineRider is built around playing with mathematical systems, piggybacked on a venerable tradition: the near-universal impulse for geeky teenagers to mess around with graphing calculators. Every puzzle yields an infinite well of solutions, yet each one can be crafted to convey a specific concept and gate the player based on their level of understanding. Instead of a linearized sequence of concepts bolted onto the Common Core standard, we present a rich interactive world optimized for mathematical exploration and discovery through play. SineRider is built for joy, and from joy emerges learning.
Solving for joy demands an approach more familiar to entertainers than educators. We started development by asking: Who are our characters? What do they look like? Where do they come from? Why are they here, and what dramatic change is brought by their journey? We seek to build an experience every bit as visually beautiful and emotionally evocative as anything else on Steam. In short, we seek to build a great game.
SineRider is a game about graphing, but also a game about love, loss, and reconnection. It's a game about the swelling emotions that overwhelm you watching a sunset give way to a starfield while floating along with a ghost who means more to you than any other. We hope you enjoy playing as much as we've enjoyed building it.
Well if you like, you can contribute to this open-source repository of vanilla javascripty goodness. We need volunteer artists, writers, programmers, and puzzle designers. Most of all we need your help spreading the word about this free-forever indie game with a $0 advertising budget… but if you're a smart teenager who wants to change education for the better, you should come join Hack Club!
To quickly run the server from a terminal you can execute the following command (note: requires python3 to be installed):
python3 -m http.server 3000
For more serious development in an integrated development environment, one attractive option is using Visual Studio's Live Server plugin which supports features such as live reload, etc.
After successfully starting the server, navigate to http://localhost:3000 in your browser.
Hack Club is a global network of students building student-led learning initiatives. We create financial, educational, and community infrastructure for hack clubs, hackathons, and individual hackers worldwide. It's a nice place where nice people do nice things for each other. You should check it out.
Hack Club and SineRider are founded upon the same principles: self-direction, playfulness, and respect for the time, agency, and intelligence of young people. If you want to contribute to projects like this one, you've found your tribe. Come join us.