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.
1,000@IsaacKing it would really help me bet on this if I knew which of the listed games you have already played, since the description seems to say games you already played are ineligible to resolve Yes (? can you confirm that?).
@prismatic seems like it could remain open indefinitely. Isaac would need to find time to try out a couple dozen games.
Unless you have a special interest in this market you might not want to put too much mana in it.
@jcb Sadly it seems to be partly broken.
We were discussing it earlier in the month and found that certain features of the site just don't work anymore.
The core exercises do seem to mostly work though.
This game trains your knowledge, numerical intuition, and ability to aggregate information from different sources.
The market was broken after probably being converted from an older market format. I moved the probabilities and subsidized for several thousand mana, if you would be so kind as to refrain from betting for 3-6 hours while that drizzles in, the market would have a reasonable chance of "almost working normally" after that is done.
Is "Duolingo" a game? It might be a game. It reportedly has over 10 million users. It claims to also teach things, but it looks/sounds like a game from what I heard.
It's trading at just 0.5%, but it seems like by many definitions of 'best' it has had an outsized impact.
Everything in a computer can be constructed from a basic component called a NAND gate. You will be challenged through a series of puzzles, to discover the path from NAND gates to arithmetic, memory and all the way to full CPU architectures. If you complete this game, you will have a deep understanding of how assembly, CPU instruction sets and basic components are related. And you will understand how programming concepts like if statements, loops and functions actually work in assembly and hardware.
By the way my answer would definitely be https://ohmygit.org/, but I don't want to pay the 250M to submit a new answer since I doubt I'll get it back
@colorednoise It's not instructional. It gives players opportunities to creativly solve math and system engineering problems. It also exposes players to information about what materials are made of and by what processes they are gathered or made.
@HankyUSA Against your second point, Factorio does not even represent copper and iron ore as their real-life colors. You craft bullets directly from metal without any propellant or explosives. It's a deeply unrealistic game, essentially a cartoon version of science.
@colorednoise It teaches how to think about problem solving, abstraction, and modularity in a way that is surprisingly close to some real-world problems like software development.
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.