Alias is a HyperCard-based toolkit for creating cultural, historical, and social simulations. By entering data about a certain culture or period of time, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators in related fields can create simulations that let their students play the role of an individual of that culture and time.
With Alias, instructors could create a simulation of a hunter-gatherer society in South America, the politics of 16th-century Italy, or life in present-day Japan. The simulations will be as rich and detailed as the data they provide for it.
Alias simulations can help students gain a feel for the attitudes, biases, concerns, and thought processes of individuals living in the time and culture of the simulation. Specific areas of focus include political dilemmas, economic trends, social customs, or career decisions. For even greater involvement, students can be assigned to create Alias simulations themselves, researching their subject and weighing the relative importance of various aspects of their material.
To use Alias, you enter information in the form of events. Events can be as simple as a single historical incident or they can be quite complex. Alias allows four kinds of events.
•One-time events, e.g., “Columbus lands in the New World”
•Opportunities, e.g., “Tryout for baseball team” (this event exists for a fixed span of time)
•Complex events, e.g., “Apply for college” (this event recurs and exists for a fixed span of time; complex events can also happen at a random time and with a given probability)
Besides a title and date, events usually contain text, and can include a choice to be made, a graphic, recorded sound, and even a video segment. Any event can have various consequences based on what choice the student makes, the events that have occurred before in the simulation, pure chance, or a combination of these. Students move from event to event, making choices and tracking the progress of the character whose role they’re playing.
Alias allows you to give goods to a character (e.g., cows, acres, money, clothes), and to construct exchange rates for those goods. You can create various relationships (e.g., social, business, familial) between the main character and other characters, change the relationships, and use their status to vary the simulation. Simulations made with Alias can be stopped at any point and resumed later.
Alias requires HyperCard 1.2.1 or later, a Macintosh® II, SE/30, or later model, a hard disk, and two megabytes of memory. Alias will run on a 2-megabyte Macintosh Plus or SE without a hard disk, but its speed there is acceptable only for entering data, not for testing. If you intend to use video, you need a videodisc, a video monitor, and one of the following videodisc players: Hitachi 9550, Sony 2000, Sony 1500, Pioneer 6000A, Pioneer 6010A, Pioneer 4200 or Panasonic 2026F.
This Informational Version of Alias shows some sample events from the Cook's Tour of Paradise demonstration that comes with Alias. In Cook's Tour, the student plays the role of Midshipman McAllen, a crew member on Captain James Cook's first voyage to the south seas.
Alias was written by Brodie Lockard of the Courseware Authoring Tools (CAT) Project at Stanford University. Lockard has created educational software for Stanford faculty in French, Medicine, Economics, Anthropology, and Film History.
