Tangential to the subject, I recently attended a presentation on educational video games by Keith Devlin of Stanford's H-STAR program. The main point that I came away with was that too many "educational" games break the immersive experience of a video game. An example Devlin gave was of an arithmetic game where a math equation was drawn onto a monster, and the player is expected to solve the equation before the monster clubs him. As soon as the player sees the math equation on the monster's belly, he is no longer playing a video game; he is doing a math problem.
A couple of counter-examples might be Civilization and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, where the educational aspects are so well integrated into the game that one might not consider it an educational game unless it were advertised as such.
Most games are educational in a way: they teach you something about their in-game universe, and the player has to recognize and learn patterns to win the game. The trick is to make a game where the patterns teach the players what you want them to learn without breaking the immersive experience that makes players want to continue playing a video game.
MIT's Vanished looks like it is doing well if it has produced 4,000 forum posts from 5,000 users (actually, the count is up to 37,500; you don't need an account to see the forum, although the comments are still hidden). The description makes it sound like the Portal 2 marketing campaign, with puzzles to solve in different media, rather than a video game.
Nicely put. I'm convinced that you could make, say, an educational chemistry game where the point was to actually solve problems with chemistry. A bit like SpaceChem plot-wise, but with nucleophilic substitution and balancing redox reactions instead of computer programming-esque puzzles.
You could basically take homework problems, dress them up with fancy interactive, informative graphics, and stick them in a "tycoon" game where you're manufacturing and selling chemicals. With some side work analyzing environmental pollutants, cleaning up accidents, reverse-engineering your competitors' products with spectroscopy, that sort of thing. I'd play that.
A couple of counter-examples might be Civilization and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, where the educational aspects are so well integrated into the game that one might not consider it an educational game unless it were advertised as such.
Most games are educational in a way: they teach you something about their in-game universe, and the player has to recognize and learn patterns to win the game. The trick is to make a game where the patterns teach the players what you want them to learn without breaking the immersive experience that makes players want to continue playing a video game.
MIT's Vanished looks like it is doing well if it has produced 4,000 forum posts from 5,000 users (actually, the count is up to 37,500; you don't need an account to see the forum, although the comments are still hidden). The description makes it sound like the Portal 2 marketing campaign, with puzzles to solve in different media, rather than a video game.