Games that Rock

It’s Tax Day, and if you need to de-stress (or procrastinate even more), there’s no better way than by indulging your geological side with video games that “rock.” (We’ll show ourselves out…)

Skyrim – Come for the epic battles, stay for the compressional and extensional faults.

Stardew Valley – This game is mostly about farming, but if you want to, you can spend all of your in-game time mining for iron and copper ore, collecting interesting minerals, or collecting and cracking geodes, with (of course) the added difficulty of fighting off the occasional stone golem or slime monster. Just like real geological field work.

Minecraft – You can harness the game’s creative mode to build geological models – check out this one from the British Geological Survey. This blog has more on how geoscientists are using the game to build “3D earth models for simulating geophysical experiments.”

Seismic Duck – This freeware game’s tagline is “Reflection Seismology Was Never So Much Fun!” Curious? Check out the duckumentation here.