On 4/16/2019 at 5:39 PM, 1024 said:

Maybe you can have the player do the same thing (or a similar thing) multiple times, each time with choices, but they have to pick a different option every time. This way it still feels like a choice, but they go through all options. Or you could make each situation have one option (a different each time) be better than others, and let the player min-max through all of them themselves. Players like to pick the optimum/overpowered option, and they feel good about doing it.

Edit: Another thought: "designing a game to teach people" is kind of like designing tutorials in games. Some game tutorials are fun (and some not so much), and they all have certain knowledge (game mechanics) that they have to go through. You may want to look into designing game tutorials for more ideas.

also I think puzzle game is a good idea because you'll be able to separate different knowledge and give players basically a reference to look up to. A lot of times merge different knowledge into one game mechanic is just unreliable, player would rather go back reading books one more time than going through a "big" game and  repeating some knowledge they possibly already understand.

I did my dissertation on Edutainment, Gamification of Learning/Teaching, Computer assisted learning (CAL), and Serious games.

What are we using as our yard stick for boring games? What audience are we looking at? and what level of engagement are we expecting?

If we're talking about the K-12 market, there have been many games over the years that are 'Edutainment' that have some reasonably good engagement. The Math Blaster series by Davidson was particularly well known and has recently been modernised for the current platforms. If we're talking about adults, the focus seems more heavily on CAL where we have gamification techniques being applied to flashcard systems which is what Duolingo relies on with its badges and leader boards.

I'd love to do a market study to see what people look for in their learning platforms, I would expect adults want to see a 'professional appearance' and to show 'good structure', while children want something interactive and the chance to 'blow up the baddies'. Using a Bartle style approach, i'd expect adults to be more "social/achievers" while children are likely to be more "Killer/Explorer" type players, leading to significantly different experience that needs to be built for them.

I think the challenge for education games designed for adults is that the industry for this tends to focus on teaching kids, because its 'easier to show a fun game for kids to play that teaches', and that 'kids are playing games more than adults'... missing the demographic change that has happened over the last 10 years pushing up the average gamer age, up up and up.