Educational games are not the same as "gamification" as an incentive structure, and I also think you're being very prescriptive of your own research style. I knew several academics in my PhD that thrived off being able to publish papers in better conferences, faster, etc than their peers. Also there's a pretty strong niche of puzzle game solvers (think the MIT Puzzle Hunts) that love thinking through problems in gamified ways.

Educational games are just games that also teach fun things along the way. I grew up playing the Carmen Sandiego games and it sparked a lifelong interest in history. When I got to college I took a bunch of history classes and even did a bit of undergrad research in it (well "history" is an incredibly broad topic and not something you research, but rather focusing on a topic that I was interested in) on the side. Think interactive fiction games exploring historical settings or works of literature. Games with some light math-based puzzling.

I don't think high level academic work can ever be taught through a game, but students feel the freedom to explore high level concepts when they are comfortable and confident with low level concepts, something that games can bring across better than the underpaid, overworked teacher in a lot of schools.

This comment reminds me of Status as a Service by Eugene Wei.

"Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being published. Parents show off photos of their children performances at recitals, people preen in the mirror while assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists while wishing to be on them, reporters check the Techmeme leaderboards; life is nothing if not a nested series of status contests."

Some status games are better than others. ie when the game requires some common good to be performed, or the mastery of a useful skill. Some status games reward things that only drag us down

As an aside, when people point out virtue signalling (I'm taking it as an analogue of status games) without adding some analysis my first assumption is that they are virtue-signalling to put others down or make others seem shallow (or themselves deep). The cornerstone of western morality is Jesus and he was quite the "virtue signaller". Point being that the observation on it's own is uninteresting without saying something about the context or consequences of a behaviour. There aren't many things that are /purely/ virtue signals (or status games) and those that are, are quite obvious.

Jesus spoke about humility and dying for your beliefs, which he did. Martyrs don't need to signal their virtue (or social status), they do the virtous thing.

Status is a public display of desireability. It doesn't have much to do with virtue, but everyone wants it anyway.

Don't blend those two concepts, they are separate. People who make a public display and performance out of their virtues, 'virtue signallers' miss the point. You do it in humility before God.

People who don't show off their status, get little benefit out of it.

But what's "common good" and a "useful skill" itself is defined by a status game.

The selection of which status games to play is itself a status game.

It’s possible to do none of those things.

I do none of those things.

Think of it instead as designing tools that make learning fun, and enables that gratifying feeling you described. Lego, for example, has probably created generations of people with incredibly high levels of visual-spatial intuition who've all been inspired to go on to become designers and engineers of all kinds.

It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for something to be considered education.

Yep. Perfect example of this being the Lego Mindstorms platform. We had a "robotics club" at my private school which used the Mindstorms visual programming tools; there were 10 year olds learning about loops and variables in a way that was legitimately _fun_.

>designing tools that make learning fun

While I don't wholly disagree, there's a lot of edtech out there premised on the notion that all subjects, even sometimes challenging ones, should be like playing a game for all people or you're doing it wrong. I submit that you're always going to have some percentage of students who pretty much hate math however you teach it and some percentage who don't want to read books even with relatively "fun" and easy options.

Can I find plenty of problems at all levels of education? Sure. Are there more engaging things we can do even in an environment that's largely not personalized? Of course. But everyone should have fun all the time is not really a realistic goal unless you just let kids do whatever they want.

Everyone should have fun all the time is not really a realistic goal, period. I don't think playing games is universally fun either. Games can be quite boring.

Games do often promote the concept of winning and losing, however.

Sure, I don't have an objection on that. In fact, anything up until college is actually distilled and idealised version of the ideas about how nature works. That's why people solve math, physics and other problems recreationally.

However I don't want to call it gamification because those are not designed in a game format in order to make you do something that you normally wouldn't want to do. Those are simplification or analogies to bring ideas within the grasp of the student so they can reach it with their current toolset but without mischaracterising it. So when a student calculates the trajectory of a ball in ideal condition, this is still a calculation of a balls trajectory and not something else.

When I'm really in flow at work, it can almost feel like a game. Then I go back to yak shaving and jira.

There are (and could be better) environments that can isolate and focus on that. The combo of interface and specific challenge can really help communicate what's magical about engineering. Ideally that would help motivate people (versus just being a dopamine hit source).

Highly visual environments with rapid feedback seem to hit that button for me. The old bridge building game Pontifex was great, as was Besiege. I'd love to see more like that (there probably are, I've not played many games in years)

> The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases.

This is also how Kerbal Space Program works, to name one example of an educational game.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1356/

There's a job I was considering recently that is space-related, I almost wanted to modify my resume with "I don't have professional experience with orbital mechanics, but I do have xxx hours in Kerbal Space Program on Steam."

Depends on the domain. Mavis Beacon absolutely outclassed any of the "classwork" on typing I had in school.

edit: the 24 card games were really great too, though maybe only if you were already inclined towards math

For me it was flirting with girls on ICQ, and getting owned at StarCraft 1 before voip was a thing.

Nothing teaches typing better, in my experience.

PHDs are never going to be learning through games but I think at lower levels of education there's a ton of room to inspire a desire to learn something more deeply through games.

Kerbal Space Program seems like a game which both can both inspire newcomers and could also actually be used by PHDs to bounce around ideas. At the least it seems like some actual astrophysics PHDs rely on it for inspiration.

I agree that games intended to teach academic subjects are very hard to get right. Interestingly, when you take the arrow in the other direction, ordinary video games have sometimes been the arena of some very advanced "doing science", e.g.:

"Speedrunning as a gateway to scientific endeavours" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50

"The Complete History of the Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94lfiY18_CgWGQzweD_a...

come on, nobody is a polymath.[1]

There is some really boring stuff to slog through on the journey of a formal education.

In school, people tend to choose subjects they are fascinated with, to the detriment of the other subjects.

I think some subjects like history either benefit from actual life experience, or need some additional storytelling to appreciante.

we really don't need the "wooden straightback chairs in schoolrooms" mentality

gamification might smack of spoonfeeding, but it also might allow a much richer learning experience too.

[1] statistically speaking

Duolingo is doing it amazingly to learn a new language.

I speak 3 languages, attempted to learn the 4th one (German) on Duolingo and I find it very ineffective.

I recall having trouble learning English back in high school and then having a breakthrough. The breakthrough was, I figured out how to think in English when trying to debug my errors with the teacher who actually have lived in the USA. Once it clicked, I no longer had to memorise things but predict instead. My English is still not perfect but I can have fluent conversations and almost never need to look up words, I can figure out the meaning of idioms etc.

IMHO, the gamification in Duolingo is not geared towards making you figure out the mechanics behind the language. I think edge case exploration is way to go but the gamification usually revolves around memorising.

I agree. One skill is recognizing the meaning from a sentence already formed (what Duolingo puzzles consist of). A very different skill is coming up with the sentence in the target language without hints.

There is the company called Assimil that has small books based on this concept, where first you are filling in the blanks (not choose from preexisting options) and as the book progresses you have to fill in more and more of the sentence.

This heavily depends on a course, and courses are different between pairs of languages.

E.g. learning Spanish from English on Duolingo is very natural, the course is built the way a baby learns a language, by practice and suggestion, with few small bits of grammar info strewn along the way. According to reports from my friends, learning Spanish from Russian on Duolingo is a completely different experience, all based on memorizing large amounts of rules before any practice even begins, and it works really poorly.

I assume that learning languages on Duolingo is all about building a chain of good courses based on languages you already know by the moment you consider another one. (Only partly joking.)

Duolingo is a pretty good tool for practice, but for trying to learn a language from scratch it's probably best to go through some YouTube videos for the pronunciation and some books first and consider it a kind of fancy flash card thing to do on the side.

I think the key is, nobody wants to be preached to. You need the game to naturally involve the skills you are trying to teach.