Shouting “Are you not edutained?!” to a crowd of children as a small child emperor gives me a thumbs down symbol. I must die a mathiator’s death.

Edit: Addiator* It was right there.

KSP is the best educational game there is in terms of learning to fun gameplay ratio. The physics are simplified, but accurate enough to gain an intuitive understanding of how spacecraft navigate in orbit

Mario Teaches Typing

The Typing Of The Dead

You say this, but like all the Humongous Games edutainment games ruled. Pajama Sam, Putt Putt, Spy Fox, Freddi Fish… Classics!

Kerbal Space Program legit taught me a lot.

I still crashed every ship I made, but I still learned a lot about space travel

I learned about arawanas from that amazon trail game.

One of my favorite Arma missions was we all loaded in for a night mission, and I was squad lead, and we realized that the mission designer didn’t give us nods. So we did the whole mission with flashlights, flares, glowsticks, and at several points were literally navigating by the North Star (ARMA has an accurate starmap that changes over the course of the year!). Such a cool memory.

I feel like the more you have to learn something in order to utilize game mechanics, the more likely you are to retain information.

ie survival games with foraging mechanics can instill the basics of foraging, plant species, and how said species need to be processed in order to be edible, because the player is able to mechanically benefit by learning those things

I’ll add mine in, Morrowind taught me how to use city transit before I had ever even visited a city. Different types of transit having different loops, pros and cons, and various transfer hubs.

Hey, some of those JumpStart games were pretty rad! Also Math Blaster and OutNumbered. And we can’t forget the grandpappy of edutainment games, The Oregon Trail!

But your overall thrust is correct–in order to be a successful edutainment game, it has to be fun first, educational second. That doesn’t have to be a distant second, but if it’s not fun no amount of education you cram in there is ever gonna get conveyed anyway.

That’s not necessarily you not learning, it’s you not having fun. “Any good game can be educational, but no educational games are good” would be a more accurate title for this post, even if it’s blatant hyperbole.

For reals though, my parents were vehemently down with the initial pikemon craze, I was 6-7 in 98 and they noticed how much reading is involved in the video and card games, there’s a bunch of math in the card game (there is in the video game but they didn’t really play them and it’s optional as hell). They thought the TV show sucksd and Digimon was a better cartoon but were pretty quick to notice this was really helping me learn some basic shit. I’m certain Pokémon gave me the early gains in reading comprehension and analysis cause knowing the most about Pokémon made you cooler than other kids. I found out you could find fan translated versions of Japanese episode scripts with screenshots from the Japanese broadcast making for a pretty solid summary of what was coming in 6 months cause people posted that kind of stuff in the early late 90s to 2000s interwebs. There were kids in my class who were certain I had some sort of inside connection to the Digimon production cause I’d read fan translations and was doodling Digimon in class that would appear in the show later on. So Digimon appropriately taught me that using the internet as a resource of arcane info and not a place for flash games could be useful as hell. My early gamer years also helped me be a wise consumer, once again my folks were pretty smart in getting me some gaming magazine subscriptions (they were like $12 for a year, so it wasn’t a big deal) so I could compare write ups and reviews and make informed choices as to what I’d want for Christmas and stuff. My cousins and friends would have game shelves filled with obvious shovelware, I learned to be choosy fast and once again, my folks were very cool with frequent game rentals cause it was like $15 to get 3 for a week and you could test drive before making a full commitment. This is partially cause they also really like video games, I’ll be heading over soon for Christmas eve and we will be getting drunk and playing Mario Kart. So yeah, tldr: gaming can for sure learn yiu stuff and I have pretty cool parents who are at the very least informed consumers.

Idk what Math Circus or coolmathgames.com taught me but those were all unblocked and had some fun games

I assume you have not played any games made by MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium).

They’re the ones that made the OG Oregon Trail, Lemonade Stand, Dynopark Tycoon, Odell Down Under the fish simulator, and a series of point and click puzzle games like Museum Madness.

I haven’t played all of their games but all the ones I have played are bangers.

I learned Frog Fractions from Frog Fractions.

My very first video game was SimEarth which taught me how to be a weird dork.