I'm looking for games that help people learn useful concepts. The games need to actually be enjoyable; an "educational" game that no one wants to play isn't actually doing much education. A few examples of the sorts of games I'm looking for:
Minecraft: Teaches the basics of logic circuits.
Understand/Eleusis: Teaches inductive reasoning.
Cookie Clicker: Teaches the power of exponential growth. (Ok, this one's a bit of a reach.)
Kerbal Space Program: Teaches orbital mechanics.
Manufactoria: Teaches concepts relating to finite-state automata and formal grammars. (This one likely isn't very fun for most people who aren't already interested in that sort of stuff, so it's not as good an example.)
I'll resolve this market to the top 5 suggested games that I haven't played before, in 30/25/20/15/10 proportions based on the importance of the topics they teach and how good I think they are at teaching them.
There's no set resolution date on this market; I'll leave it open until I've had a chance to try out all of the suggestions that look interesting.
Related questions
Like Cookie Clicker, but better and about AI.
https://www.euclidea.xyz/en/game/
This one seems to not working anymore, it was a puzzle game about geometry.
Just put it here if it starts to work again soon
@dionisos A sort of programming game where you should solve puzzles with a small set of simple instructions. Some of the puzzles are really ingenious, I liked it a lot.
Also it is open source and on Android.
SineRider: a game in which you travel through level to level by inputting the correct algebraic function for your character's path to transform and go through the required path. Adds complexity as you go with multiple/more difficult paths and there is an element of story.
In public beta and made by high schoolers so has potential to get even better as it goes! Amazing way to brush up algebra and graph transformations.
WE BECOME WHAT WE BEHOLD
a game about news cycles, vicious cycles, infinite cycles
https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
A five minute game revolving around one piece of practical philosophy.
Untrusted is available here for free, in browser:
@rjgumby surprised this wasn't here yet. Chess is great for planning, visualization, setting priorities, and learning to make hard choices.
@LukeHanks Simulator that teaches about disease, particularly in terms of how it spreads. The Cure is some free DLC about running a worldwide disease prevention organization. I played it with one of my kids to teach them about disease and disease prevention.
@LukeHanks Obviously educational as it exists to teach languages. I think the way it goes about it is obviously a game.
Arr you author? Hmmm...
https://lifehacker.com/11-educational-video-games-that-are-actually-fun-1849788759
@kazoo That website is clickbaity enough that I don't particularly want to read through its suggestions, but feel free to add them as answers here.
@Charlie I played one game of this, but found it rather overcomplicated and tedious. What concepts do you think it's good at teaching?
@IsaacKing I agree that learning it is pretty tedious. (And it does always take a while to play without some tweaks.) But the thing I really appreciated is how each of the 400+ "patents" or cards your corporation can play feel really well thought-out. I think it does make you feel like the CEO of a corporation over the course of hundreds of years greenlighting various projects to would legitimately contribute to terraforming Mars if undertaken in real life. And the mechanics of the game are well-aligned with the theme. The internal logic of the game doesn't feel contrived, it feels like it's based in actual science and economics. So having played several times, I feel like I have a slightly more informed playbook of how terraforming Mars might actually work.