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.
"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."
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.
It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for something to be considered education.
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.
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.
Games do often promote the concept of winning and losing, however.
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)
This is also how Kerbal Space Program works, to name one example of an educational game.
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."
edit: the 24 card games were really great too, though maybe only if you were already inclined towards math
Nothing teaches typing better, in my experience.
"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...
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
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.
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.)
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.