Video Games Are the Future of Education

I'm most hopeful we will see this in maths. I know this has been talked about for 40 years with computers, since Papert's Mindstorms (highly recommended if you haven't read it). But the potential to teach math through immersion as you would a native language IMO = the potential to leap society forward exponentially.

Why hasn't it been built yet? Lots of comments in this thread already about the blocking incentive model and education system. 100%. I'd look instead outside the system, to something like Minecraft. Obviously, we don't want to privatize education into the hands of some monocultured tech platform. But a diversity of games that teach different things to people at different levels? That supplement social education? That are fun first? eg. Here's a basic word game I built that everyone seems to enjoy, and is also a great vocab lesson: (https://apps.apple.com/app/esoterica/id1505210583).

If we can find the right models to support such a diversity (we're certainly not there yet), I see great promise in that future.

Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465862

The article rightly prizes tacit knowlege, but does not lay any argument for why games would give us tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is primarily gained only by experience, and I don't see how games give us that in ways that the majority of folks would can say they had unambiguously helped us in the kinds of real world tasks we care about.

[1] Naomi Clark: Why Tom Nook symbolizes village debt in 18th century Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgEnbXPZX4s

Long story short: it doesn't sell.

At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games.

1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play.

2. Sell them to the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won't tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON'T have kids the same age.

Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper.

Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier,

Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don't have the necessary media connections.

Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very "incestuous").