That's back when CD-ROM was a novelty and assets still had to fit on floppies, most people didn't have home PCs let alone internet connection, schools generally had few (outdated) PCs which people didn't know how to use.. So they abandoned the idea in the era before it was viable, in an era where game design wasn't particularly well understood.. (sorry, even though there are some very good titles from the early 90s, there was hardly any rigor or insight into to game design and too many games suffered from terrible design, thankfully most of these games are now forgotten).

And that's exactly the educational games I remember seeing, very crummy stuff that hardly passes for a game, made with low budget and for ancient PCs, obviously designed by non-gamers. It's no surprise that stuff wasn't convincing anyone.

You're missing the point here. Better technology has little to do with the problem. Current day educational titles aren't any better than the ones were decades ago. I'm working on my masters in education right now and games are unlikely to ever be very useful outside of niche situations for educational use.

It's a pipe dream where people keep thinking that it's going to work and yet, there's been very little progress in terms of something that actually works.

The thing is though that that was the golden era of educational titles. The ones around now aren't any better and for the most part are just the same sort of thing with better graphics and more questions. The AI necessary to drive real educational software just does not exist at this time. Sure, you can manually create puzzle games and the like, but students outgrow those quite quickly and you still have to worry about how the students integrate the knowledge with other knowledge.

Fundamentally, games are just not conducive to any sort of deep learning. Sure, for some things like typing, having a game can be fun. Or, if you need to get wicked fast at your times tables, but for any sort of deep learning, games are at best not very helpful and at worst can make things worse.

And I'm speaking as somebody who was once in one of those educational FMV laserdisc games of the early '90s. So, I'd much rather be suggesting that these are great. :-P

I learned a ton of stuff from Age of Empires (especially the encylcopedia in the second one), Age of Mythology (again, the encyclopedia) and Titan Quest (most of the locations, enemies and quests are based on actual mythology stuff) .

Then there is World of Tanks, which made me somewhat of a pseudo tank expert.

There are probably more but I think I learned the most from these.

My point here is that I'm not convinced anyone's seriously trying, or at least I haven't seen or heard of the results if someone is. If you're saying current educational games are limited in scope and just reiteration of 90s crummy garbage with better graphics, you're sort of proving my point. There's so much more that could be done and nobody is doing it!

There are many fields where progress comes to a grinding halt (even if a few academics with limited resources are toying with their doodles that will never make any impact) until it resurges again decades later with fresh ideas and a different outlook, along with crucial changes in supporting technology. Of course, financial incentives need to align too. There might be "tons of money" in educational software (if done right) but getting started and getting started big enough to get a piece of that cake might just take a truckload of money. I can't imagine that many institutions today would pay for 90s tier stuff, and you can't just throw a quick prototype / proof of concept together in three months and show it off on kickstarter.

And that's kinda where I imagine the whole thing is right now, basically everybody gave up in the 90s when the "golden era" ended and nobody's doing anything serious right now. And fwiw the bar for serious work today should be much higher just as it is for games. And getting the funding to start anything serious is not there, ergo we can't have seen anything serious. Where does this fundamental truth stem from? I'm not convinced.

On the flipside, I think that the vast majority of primary (and probably most of secondary) education isn't particularly deep anyway.

This is one of the reasons why we require teachers to have a license and complete relevant coursework. I'm sure that it seems like the bar should be higher than it was back then. But, the games back then were quite a bit better than you're giving them credit for and the level of technical sophistication needed to get good enough is a lot higher than it might seem.

It's only been within the last 10 years or so that we got competent chatbots that could really interact with people like a real person in limited areas. Teaching and education will be one of the last areas where AI programs are able to replace actual humans due to the sheer complexity of the task.

We know from the last century of research as well as personal experience, that learning is social, it's messy and the student is ultimately responsible for figuring out how to own what's being taught. We also know that how precisely lessons go is largely unpredictable. You can have the same lesson and activity go right in one classroom and then fail horribly in the next one with no particular warning signs ahead of time.

Computers do not handle ambiguity very well and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Sure, AI is getting better, but we're nowhere near the point where it's good enough to provide the appropriate learning environment for anything other than basic rehearsal or discovery of very basic concepts.

This is a massive topic. I don't think that I can provide enough citations to make this understandable to lay people. I've spent the last year studying on top of another year in grad school on a different certificate and the better part of 10 years of professional experience.

But, if you start with Piaget and Vygotsky and work your way forward, it should be relatively clear why it is that computers, at least the kind we'll have in the next 10-20 years, are unlikely to be capable of doing much more than what was possible in the past.

But, in short, computers are linear and they need to be programmed ahead of time to deal with the complications that arise during the process. Computers for flashcards or simple tasks tend to work great, when there's one, or a small number of, predictable answers. However, when the answers are subjective or possible results aren't predicted ahead of time, they fail miserably.

I've worked with students having to enter their math into computer systems for years and it's ugly. Taking an answer that you've worked out on paper should be a nobrainer in terms of computers, but even those programs frequently get it wrong. If they can't score math and science correctly, then why on earth would they do better at the humanities where the answers are frequently subjective?

The unstated premise in all of what you wrote seems to be that the educational game should replace human instructors. I'm well aware of the limitations of computers and AI on that front.

I'm looking at it from a completely different angle: studying today involves a ton of time with textbooks, exercises, and recorded lectures & other instructionals in a stiff format. These things don't grade you, they don't give you a chance to ask questions, they don't talk back to you. Even on-prem lectures offer very limited opportunity for questions and other forms of social interaction; after all, the lecturor is usually teaching dozens of students at once and there's a certain amount of material to go through. You can afford to lose your train of thought or get confused only so many times..

Even a very simplistic program can provide a heck of a lot more flexibility than any of these materials do. I'm not proposing that educational games should replace instructors and assistants who grade you or interpret ambiguous questions from confused students. But they can still provide for a ton of material in a format that bends to the student's needs much more than everything except the one-on-one human interaction that doesn't scale.

It slipped my mind, but you'd probably want to look at Bloom's Taxonomy to see why it is that games are not suitable. You're not likely to reach those more advanced states with an educational game, at least not without very specifically designed ones.

I'm not assuming that we're replacing human teachers, we're at least a few decades away from that being possible. The point, that I'm getting at here is that educational games are of extremely limited utility to the point where there's not much point in using them for most things. In some niches, like reading, they can be somewhat useful, but even in those niches, there's much better options.

With the technology available today, the amount of actual education you get out of them is pretty limited. It's similar to "educational" TV that's usually of little value. Sure, it can be a nice introduction to something or other, but the educational value is questionable at best, because it can't address the higher levels of reasoning. Games are somewhat better in that they're more prone to being used interactively, but there again, the technology isn't there to do the kind of higher level thinking necessary to really benefit from it. In time, that may change, but we're decades away from the point where games are going to be useful.

Games are games, the intention of them is to have fun. Trying to shoehorn in education is just that.