Comment by Almondsetat a day ago
Nobody would like these kinds of games just like nobody has ever liked "educational" games.
Why?
Because they try too hard, since their main objective is not to be a good game.
It's like reading a novel and immediately noticing the story is just some thinly veiled bullshit so that the author can vomit their own personal view of the world. It makes you lose interest real fast.
The goal of these games is probably closer to Kerbal Space Program or MS Flight Simulator than an "educational" game.
Imagine playing within the parameters and finding a combination that brings unexpected results. It's probably harder to design than a standard game, but I think there's potential to have something pretty entertaining otherwise.
To be honest i agree, idk if I gained a ton of knowledge from KSP(I know what deltaV is now) but man does that stuff - as well as the flight simulators - let you grok some concepts better than any other way. Except actually flying I guess.
Seeing a planet on the map appear close but be invisible, then turning into my whole view really helped me grasp the distance between bodies in space. And KSP is scaled down!
Reading about stalls helps but crashing the tutorial Cessna twelve times really helps you understand what a stall is and why it happens.
Beg to disagree, plenty of people love puzzle games. This doesn't need to appeal to everyone. The article cites two examples of such games that lead to scientific progress.
> nobody has ever liked "educational" games.
You take that back, I loved educational games as a kid! There were indeed plenty of crappy ones out there, but some were really well-made. For example, Pink Panther's Passport to Peril was a charming point-and-click adventure that taught you about cultures in other countries.
There's a small cult following in the Netherlands for these types of edutainment games and a small group of people have set out to archive all of them: https://nationaalarchiefeducatievegames.nl/
Math Blaster, Number / Word Muncher, Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, Crosscountry Canada
Plague Inc. is fun and (I assume) unintentionally educational.
It taught me a lot of (simplified) country locations and population sizes.
I think that's the point of parents comment, it's unintentionally educational, but primarily supposed to be fun. If it was built with educational as the primary concern, and fun being secondary, then probably the game wouldn't have wound up as popular.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but that's how I understood parents comment.
People will hurt themselves only to avoid boredom. People play souls games exactly because they are hard and offer a challenge.
The protein folding games paved the way to AlphaFold.
> It's like reading a novel and immediately noticing the story is just some thinly veiled bullshit so that the author can vomit their own personal view of the world. It makes you lose interest real fast.
Cue John Galt's 100-pages monologue at the end of Atlas Shrugged.
> Nobody ever
You might be exaggerating just a wee bit. Oregon Trail is the epitome of an educational game with lasting popularity, having been around pretty much as long as PCs. There are others -- Carmen Sandiego comes quickly to mind, and arguably even Kerbal Space Program. I'm sure some actual searching could compile a decent list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(series)